By Taylor Long
In old story books, Robin Hood was a whimsical man who wore tights and stole from the rich to give to the poor. Perhaps a modern incarnation of Robin Hood would be peer-to-peer file sharing programs: “stealing” from the rich [record labels/artists] to give to the poor [consumers/fans].
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and assorted musicians have made a job of pointing an accusatory finger at programs like Napster, Grokster and Aimster, but amidst all their attempts to assign blame, the answer has slipped through their hands. There can be no doubt that file sharing has had a negative effect on CD sales, but singling it out as the music industry’s sole nemesis shows disregard for history, technology and common sense.
An article in The New York Times last Thursday by Hal Varian raises a point that should’ve been made ages ago. In his piece, Varian mentions that in the early 1900s, player pianos were considered the biggest threat to the music industry. Manufacturers of player piano rolls would purchase sheet music, hire someone to record the piece, then sell the mechanical reproductions so people could hear music at home without having to play it themselves. Songwriters were in an uproar. Eventually the Copyright Act of 1909 declared that player piano roll manufacturers had to pay songwriters a fee. Though this snippet of music business history may seem inconsequential, the point that Varian raises is an important one: throughout history, many technologies have developed that sent the music business industry into a frenzy.
Varian didn’t go beyond the player piano roll, however, it doesn’t stop there. The audio cassette tape and dual audio cassette tape recorder were enough to surface worries. With these inventions, people could copy music from radio programs, as well as from another tapes-they wouldn’t want to buy music anymore. This, of course, proved to be largely false. Though the technology to make copies was available to them, people still bought music. Soon enough, the compact disc debuted and worries concerning tape copying were left in $1 bins (along with the tapes themselves).
But with the invention of the CD eventually came more copying concerns. CD burners and recordable CDs stirred thoughts that now people would buy music and then copy it for all their friends. Certainly, this had to mean that people wouldn’t buy music anymore! Well, no, not quite. Though CD copying caught on within families or small groups of friends, buying a CD still had advantages over copying it. People were still attracted to cover art and lyrics, and the CD has reigned strong as an easy and affordable gift idea.
In the early development of MP3s and digital music, it’s hard to believe that anything will come along that could surpass it. Still, this history provides us with some often over-looked truths: the first being that with the invention of a new technology, a technology usually shortly follows that allows for copying it in a less costly way, and the second being that, though the technology is available, consumers don’t always use it.
But we can’t tackle the current issue without first looking at the figures. So, straight from the RIAA’s official website, here are figures for full-length CD sales from the past six years (Napster was released in 1999):
1999: $12.8 Billion
2000: $13.2 Billion
2001: $12.9 Billion
2002: $12.1 Billion
2003: $11.2 Billion
2004: $11.4 Billion
The decrease in sales is unavoidably clear. In their yearend reports, the RIAA first makes mention of downloading in 2000, where it says, “the singles market plummeted because of changes in consumer purchasing habits principally brought on by new options provided by the Internet. Free access online seems to have had a dramatic effect on the singles sales markets.” But full-length CD sales actually increased from 1999. The next year brought on the infamous Napster case and decision. The 2001 yearend report boasts that, “When 23 percent of surveyed music consumers say they are not buying more music because they are downloading or copying their music for free, we cannot ignore the impact on the marketplace.” Shortly thereafter, they stopped putting statements online with their yearend figures and simply let the figures speak for themselves.
Since history in this area has been so easily over-looked, let’s examine what has certainly been over-looked in relation to the $2 Billion decrease between 2000 and 2003.
Needless to say, 2003 was a bad year for music sales, but why? Yes, file sharing by this point had attracted nation-wide attention. Napster had come and gone, and similar programs like Kazaa, Aimster and Grokster had sprung up everywhere. But something equally as important largely escaped the scope of the media spotlight: a national class-act lawsuit against the top five distributors and three large retailers of CDs.
In 2003, those top five distributors and three large retailers agreed to pay $44 million in refunds to settle a lawsuit that accused them of illegally inflating CD prices. Anyone who bought CDs between the years of 1995 and 2000 was eligible for $20 from the settlement; all they had to do was go online and register. This means several things to the deficit-firstly, the loss of that $44 million; and the acknowledgement that during the year 2000, when sales peaked within the last six years, some CD prices were apparently still illegally inflated.
Bad things often lead to worse repercussions, and such was the case for the music industry in 2003. Michael Geist from firstmonday.org wrote a piece on illegal downloading in Canada, but he discovered an interesting fact about Americans. An “information and communications” survey done by the U.S. census bureau in 2003 showed that the amount of time people spent listening to music had declined. The survey implicated that people were spending increasing amounts of time talking on cell phones, playing video games and using the Internet. As a whole, people began to show less interest in listening to music. You can spend plenty of time debating why: lower quality of music, less releases, new technologies, problems with radio, etc., but that’s not the point. People just haven’t wanted to listen to music as much anymore. Could that possibly be a reason why they wouldn’t want to buy it, either? Gee, I wonder.
There was a very slight increase in sales from 2003 to 2004, so maybe there is hope yet. Regardless, the anti-downloading community is going to have to come to a few realizations if they want to get anywhere. First, less time needs to be spent targeting people and programs. This is not the answer; it is merely a distraction from actually doing something about the problem. After Napster’s demise, lots of copy-cat programs sprang up, and some of those, such as Aimster and Grokster have taken a similar fall. But I can name at least four other programs just from memory, and if you went online and looked for them, you could probably find dozens at least. Most instant messaging programs also have the capability to share files. There are website services that will enable you to share with someone by storing a file for a day or two and e-mailing them a link to the file. With the invention of huge e-mail accounts like Gmail, you could even attach a song file to an e-mail without worrying about space restrictions. There’s no way to stop file sharing as a whole: there are just too many ways to do it. Colleges have come under scrutiny because not only are college kids some of the most likely to download, campuses tend to have fast connections that lets students download more in less time. But going through the hassle of putting up a network firewall to stop peer-to-peer programs is absolutely fruitless. If someone wants to share files, they will find a way to do. Many tech-savvy college campuses have accepted this and made deals with Napster that allow students to download free-and legally-through the new, revamped program.
The next thing the anti-downloading community needs to do is focus on the advantages that CDs have left; believe it or not, there are some. Many older generations aren’t technologically inclined, so appealing to those that aren’t is going to be very important for their sales. Even with the ease of MP3s, CDs are still portable in a different way. Not everyone is going to have a way for you to play your MP3s out loud, but most will probably have ways for you to play your CDs. If you go to someone’s house or your office and want to play something, it’s a better bet that they have a CD player rather than a cable you can use to connect your MP3 player. Even if they do or if you do, not all stereos have auxiliary inputs. Many aspects of this will probably change over the years or even just months, but details like this are still going to be an advantage for the compact disc.
Lastly, the anti-downloading community needs to embrace the fact that digital audio files are already here, easy, useful and not entirely bad. Many websites host public files for free download, such as live performances and readings by authors, poets and the like. During the Republican and Democratic conventions, iTunes had audio files of the speeches available for download for free. The sooner people can embrace digital audio, the better things will work out in the long run. Many people still buy CDs, even if just to copy them onto an iPod or other portable MP3 player. The invention of “anti-piracy” CDs, however, simply motivates fans to search for means to download-legally or otherwise-digital versions of the music so they can listen to their favorite music on a portable MP3 player. Developing such technologies to try and stop the oncoming of digital audio is pointless. Not only is it a hassle, as well as a waste of time and money, it’s delaying the inevitable. Eventually, the laws, the corporations and people as a whole are going to have to catch up with the new technology. That’s the way it’s worked in the past, and this is no different. With the surge of pay downloading services, this has already become apparent. iTunes’ $0.99 songs are a hit. RealNetworks experimented with $0.50 songs and had over three million downloads in about three weeks.
Now don’t get the wrong idea. Music artists deserve our love and respect, and yes, they deserve payment for what they do. But the fact of the matter is that targeting downloaders and downloading programs, and launching “stop downloading” ad campaigns is a waste of time. It’s common sense that if people have the option of getting something for free or paying for it, unless the price is a real bargain, they’re probably going to choose free (especially when you’re a college student who has no money). With CD prices as high as they are, and even some of the pay for music Internet programs, this is even more likely.
The best companies and organizations can do is: embrace the new technology and turn it into their advantage, and give people better value for the things that they actually pay for. Again, Internet audio is already here and it’s inevitably here to stay. It’s even a great way for smaller, independent artists and music labels to get the word out about themselves (maybe that’s really why the big companies and artists are complaining). Stop trying to squash the little man, stop the blame game and take action-it’s the only way we’re all going to get what we want. Until then, just type “peer-to-peer” + free + “file sharing” into Google.
Look for an article from an online press conference with the President of the RIAA about this very subject in next week’s issue of The Chronicle.
The RIAA´s efforts to stop illegal downloading by targeting specific people has resulted in many enemies. (courtesy voltageconsulting.com)
