The current debate about piracy of copyrighted music on the Internet is
laced with denial on all sides. How long the interested
parties can maintain their posturing is anyone's guess. But if reasonable
people think more about where they want to end up when the dust settles, the
current litigious climate that threatens to polarize these stakeholders might
evolve into a new and better music industry.
Personally speaking, I find it hard to have much sympathy for anyone who's
taken a strident polemical position in the MP3.com vs. The Recording Industry
Association Of America lawsuits. To the people representing each end of
the controversy, both Michael Robertson (of MP3.com) and Hillary Rosen
(of the RIAA), I say, You can't have it both ways. Both of you claim that you
want to protect musicians, but you both want to serve your own ends first.
And although both listeners and artists have benefited from the "disruptive
technology" that is embodied in the MP3 revolution, I contend that this is not
a sustainable situation in the years to come. Why? Because RIAA or no,
musicians will need to get paid.
Sitting in a college dormitory, bumming out that the campus MIS department
has banned Napster access to your school, the world looks different to you
than it does if you were in a van driving across the country to play
at your student union. For the band, the exposure their website generates for
their music is a healthy thing, but the pay they get from selling CDs and
t-shirts this way is nothing they'll be able to retire on, let alone buy a
house or start a family with. The hope from inside the van is, in fact, that
the new indie Internet distribution channel can help these artists connect
with the music industry's current traditional channels for selling their music.
This may sound a little less like the revolution some of you might like, and
there's plenty of blame to go around for that discrepancy between hope and
and reality. Having worked as a soundman for two touring bands in the
'80s, I've seen my share of sleazy club owners, fly-by-night recording studios,
and jaded, coked-out A&R people -- and higher up the food chain, it gets really
bad...
To the naive or unlucky musician, the historical precedents for
contracts that amount to indentured servitude are too numerous to
count. Without savvy and expensive legal representation, too many
talented musicians have signed away slices of their lives to unscrupulous
record label executives. And the number of artists who actually "win"
at the game of making hit records that not only earn back their
advances but also sell into the millions or tens of millions has always
been a meager one. Musicians still have a slightly better chance of
making a living at playing music than winning the lottery (and that
includes many who sell a lot of CDs), and meanwhile, the RIAA recently
reported record profits for the industry.
So, where will we end up? The answers depend upon the economy, society,
and technology within which music will be made in the coming years. The
context in which music does business is changing daily; the artists who
are still getting screwed don't want to miss out on a whole new medium's
chance of actually getting paid for once; and audiences have been paying
too much for music anyway.
The Web is already redistributing the balance of power of the
three-legged stool of "Artists, Audience, and Industry." In ten years, no
one will care that the record industry bitched and moaned about getting
less of a cut in the monetization of audiences (possibly because it sounds
so similar to the movie industry's attempt to stop the VCR in the early
'80s). At the same time, isn't it of interest that famous musicians have
not come out in favor of Napster? The reason for the silence is perhaps that
musicians don't feel the need to come up with yet another way to get
screwed. Last, but not least: audiences have unwittingly been propping-up
the profit margins of the music industry - especially since the introduction
of the CD in the '80s. The one issue left from the CD to LP changeover is
the price of CDs to come down to a realistic level. Remember, it costs
slightly less to manufacture a CD than an LP but CDs don't cost less. Yet.
I contend that software business models will lead the way. With
the rise of the Application Service Provider (ASP) model providing
"rentable" software over the Web - the demise (or at least the
decline) of "shrinkwrap" software will certainly take place. Goodbye
applications - hello services, based on a flat-rate subscription or
transaction supported model (musician Todd Rundgren is currently
experimenting with a subscription model on his Patronet.com site).
There are bigger forces in motion than the RIAA -- or The Software
Publisher's Association for that matter. Market forces such as the
desire for high-bandwidth and ubiquitous wireless access and business
administration trends such as outsourcing are setting the stage in the
Net-connected business world for the drama that will play out in the
consumer world. And this new music business, like all other media
industries, will be reshaped by the technology it uses.
Think of selling razors and razorblades. In this new world, the music
can become the proverbial razor, and the "blades" (where you really
make the money) are in the ancillary services and products you can
sell that surround the artist (concert tickets, videos, apparel, back-catalog
albums, rare versions of songs, unreleased material, etc.).
We live in a new world where audiences can find an increasing variety of types
of music to love; where artists have a more diverse selection of
distribution, reproduction, and self-marketing methods; and where the
music industry can focus on what it does best. And you may or may not approve
of what the industry does best -- whether that's paying someone like Ry Cooder
to go to Cuba and record (and practically rescue from oblivion) octogenarian
musicians and sell millions of CD's to an audience no one could have predicted
or by creating a pop culture phenomenon's like Britney Spears or The Backstreet
Boys that give millions of kids something to fixate on. No indie-rock cartel is
ever going to stop this machine of excess, formula, and bankrolled serendipity.
Nor should it.
I'm not ready to give up all hope on the music industry. Like an overdue
12-step session, the first step is admitting you have a problem. When
all parties decide to eventually come back to the table either licking
their wounds or enjoying their newfound strengths (again, think of the
movie industry the last 15 years), it's my hope that the three parties will
articulate what they liked about each other in the first place.
