But are digital-music fans really so accustomed to freebies that there’s no way short of legislation and crippled technology for labels and artists to get paid in the age of the Internet? The geeks give a knee-jerk no, but the question does bear consideration. After all, millions have downloaded copyrighted songs free. The word from schools and campuses is that kids now assume music is something you get from a tap, instead of something that requires allowance money. And just the other day my 12-year-old informed me that a classmate had a land-office business burning copies of popular CDs on his computer and selling them to other kids for $5 a pop.
That’s clearly over the line. I hope that virtually everyone agrees a line does exist, and cashing in on someone else’s copyright puts you on the wrong side of it. That’s why, despite all the legalistic contortions, massive file-sharing systems like Napster or Morpheus can’t build law-abiding businesses.
But the fact that so many music fans loved Napster doesn’t mean they loved stealing. Besides being free, downloading music is often more convenient and faster than dutifully buying CDs. Often, a free download is the only way to obtain a certain tune. A common refrain from the file-sharing community is, “I’d pay for it if I had the chance.” So before branding MP3ers as crooks, why not give them the chance to pay? Right now the only authorized attempts are breathtakingly lame–the selection is limited, the price is astronomical, the ability to make copies even for personal use is limited. Obviously, the ultimate consumer-friendly solution is some variation of “the celestial jukebox”–easy to use as Napster, with as vast a selection, but with guaranteed quality and a reasonable price tag.
My glasses aren’t tinted with rose: plenty of people would subscribe to such a service, but a sizable population would undoubtedly forgo the monthly fees and still share tunes with friends–just because it’s so easy to make digital copies. Instead of branding those folks as hopeless thieves, the music industry might try adding honey to the mix. Creative thinkers have proposed dozens of ways in which the paradigm of freely shared music could lead to more money in the industry’s collective pocket. These range from fan clubs that offer early downloads of new songs, to music sonically engineered to the acoustics of your personal listening space. If even some of these schemes work out, not only will professional music survive, but we can do away with the idea that giving a song to a friend makes you a pirate (while preserving the idea that going into business to distribute someone else’s music does make you a miscreant).
It’s no surprise that the labels would rather brand their customers as potential shoplifters than reinvent the cash register, because new business models involve considerable risk. But the traditional model isn’t really working these days. Artists are in revolt because of repressive contracts and low royalties. Revenue streams are so skewed toward bloated megastar blockbusters that a big label loses money on any CD that doesn’t go gold. This was recently dramatized when Reprise Records refused to release the new effort from a rising band called Wilco, figuring it wouldn’t move the 500,000 copies required for profit. The band resold the album, which came out last week, to another label, but in the meantime Wilco allowed fans to download the record in MP3 format, free of charge.
