Music File-Sharing #1
June 14th, 2002 by andrew12
Tunes for all or robbery on the information superhighway? Part one of Andrew Benfield’s investigation into the future of the music industry
When the US Supreme Court ordered the shutdown of the music-sharing programme Napster in June 2000, the music industry breathed a collective sigh of relief. PC users in their millions had been using the file-sharing software to swap digital music (MP3 files) for free, apparently costing millions in lost sales. But instead of crushing this flourishing counterculture, their actions spawned dozens of imitators that are proving harder to stop.
Both technology and the sharing ethic have thus proved too strong, and file-sharing is now more popular than ever. A bad financial year has brought forth the usual music industry voices baying for the blood of the new breed of pop pirates, but what of the smaller labels, the life-blood of the growing electronica and downtempo scenes? Two years ago Napster was largely confined to the US because of the lack of fast internet access (broadband and cable) in the UK, and this was reflected in the type of music available. As broadband and cable internet services finally roll out across Britain and diverse types of music produced by home-grown independent labels begin to crop up on file-sharing networks, the question has to be asked whether this is part of a vibrant musical counterculture or simply amounts to robbery on the information superhighway.
The development of an entity like Napster was a logical extension of the internet. Originally created by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee to allow data transfers between laboratories, the World Wide Web evolved out of the need to share information and ideas. It took another leap in technology before it became possible to transfer music over the internet. A German company called Frauenhofer created MP3 compression, which by removing sounds not normally audible to the human ear, allowed digital music files to be shrunk to at least 10 times their previous size. American college students took to this technology straightaway and used chat forums to share MP3 files with each other. In 1999 a student called Shaun Fanning, with help from a couple of internet collaborators, set about creating a well-programmed and slickly-designed computer application that would provide an internet swap shop for music fans looking to exchange MP3 files. The wild growth of his creation, Napster, helped secure its place in internet history as well as guaranteeing its controversial demise.
After being up and running just 6 months, the Napster programme saw 40 million users in 2000, its first full year of operating. As the number of people using the service grew, so did its attractiveness. More and more users logged onto the Napster central server and in doing so added the details of their MP3 libraries to those of all the other users online at the time. The choice of available music became huge, and because of the centralised database, searches were fast and efficient. With the corresponding spread of fast internet access in the US, it became possible to download whole albums in less than an hour. Rare concert recordings and bootlegs attracted the older generation, while pop fans were often able to download tracks before they were commercially released.
It was this side of the phenomenon that finally caught the attention of the mainstream press and the slumbering record industry. BMG, EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony – or the ‘Big Five’ as they are known – moved as one through their industry body, the RIAA, to crush Napster through the American courts. While they never conclusively won their battle against Napster, the tiny company exhausted its limited financial resources (it never used banner advertising or similar internet money-making tactics) and was bought by one of the very companies seeking its closure, Bertelsmann, part of the BMG group. The new managers voluntarily closed Napster, hoping to reopen it as a subscription-based service containing content supplied exclusively by BMG.
As the court battles continued to rage throughout 2001 and hopes for Napster’s survival started to fade, the internet file-sharing community busily set about migrating to a host of new applications. These applications had the key distinction of working through a de-centralised network of internet users, instead of the central music library database pioneered by Napster. While this meant peer-to-peer (P2P) music-sharing applications were much slower than Napster had been, they didn’t rely on a centralised server and so couldn’t be shut down.
These second generation applications also righted some of the key faults of Napster, allowing sharing of all types of files including movies and games, and allowing users to restart downloads if they were cut off during the process. The most popular of the Napster clones – Morpheus, Kazaa/FastTrack, AudioGalaxy and WinMx – have now significantly improved P2P technology to the point where if you’re cut off during downloading a song, the programme will search for an alternative file and connect to it to complete the download – automatically. Some commentators pointed out that by using heavy-handed legal tactics to destroy Napster, the recording industry has driven file-sharers to more efficient applications that are almost impossible to shut down.
The recording industry has maintained a rigorous defence of all its actions. In its view, file-sharing represents theft on a grand scale, and users of P2P applications are the pirates of the information superhighway. When worldwide music sales fell 5% to £24.4bn in 2001 the chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, Jay Berman, said: ‘The commercial value of music is being widely devalued by mass copying and piracy. We need to address that aggressively.’ Sam Shemtob, spokesperson for the UK Association of Independent Music, compared P2P and CD burning technology to a ‘plague of locusts’ which was going to wipe out future sales.
Utilizing an international legal treaty created in 1886 to protect the authors of creative works, the legal attacks on file-sharing applications have all been for the crime of copyright infringement. Although the legal integrity of this charge has yet to be conclusively proved, news stories linking falling music sales with file-sharing are commonplace. The ‘criminalisation’ of file-sharing was one of a three part strategy by the Big Five – in tandem with multiple legal actions, stories started to appear in the media (much of which is owned by the very same Big Five – you now understand why they’re called big) about the wide-ranging damage being wreaked by file-sharing applications. CNN even ran a story linking the applications to pornography in which they were compared to ‘a cancer eating away at the soul of this country’.
Concerted attempts continue to be made to link file-sharing with other criminal activities such as terrorism and drug dealing, with the recording industry hoping to panic the technology-illiterate moral majority, which in turn pressurises national governments to legislate in the industry’s favour. While this tactic has seen considerable success in the US, with the recently passed Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) giving the recording industry access to greater legal power to stamp out copyright abuse, the level of file-sharing has nonetheless continued to grow. The latest figures show that 2 billion songs are being traded on the FastTrack system every month.
In November last year the third tactic in the continuing ‘War on Piracy’ – copy-protected CDs – came to the public’s attention. Introduced covertly with the release of Natalie Imbruglia’s latest album, this crude technique inserts white noise onto a CD’s sub-channel, an area of the disc which is usually used to store error correction data. Whilst rarely used by an audio CD player, this technique confuses the more thorough CD Rom drive of a PC, making the disc unreadable. The result was a public-relations disaster, with buyers furious that they weren’t informed that they were buying a potentially unplayable CD. Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics giant and guardian of the CD format, also weighed in with threats of legal action against the recording companies, as it felt that the degraded playback quality of the copy-protected discs meant they were being illegally labelled as true CDs. Despite all of this, recording companies from the largest (Universal) to the smallest UK independents are planning to introduce copy-protection on their future releases. The introduction of this technology is bound to quickly become a hollow gesture, however, as several CD rippers (MP3 encoding applications) already have features which allow the PC to ignore this potentially confusing sub-channel data.
Whatever the wisdom of its tactics, the sheer media clout of the recording industry means it continues to win the propaganda war. Alternative viewpoints on the file-sharing phenomena are rarely heard. The mainstream media debate has understandably focussed on the battle for pop’s intellectual property – the grievances of Madonna, Dr. Dre and Metallica have been very well aired and, in combination with falling global sales figures, paint a picture of a music industry under threat of imminent extinction.
Yet this ‘reality’ doesn’t sit with the global growth in popularity of the low profile electronica and downtempo genre, spearheaded by independent UK labels like Pork, Ninjatune and Tru Thoughts. While none of the three report massive growth, sales are up at all of the labels over recent years. This fact backs up a study published in American Demographics, a US market research magazine, which suggested that instead of reducing the amount of music purchased, use of file-sharing applications has the opposite effect. In a shocking reversal of the recording industries main argument, it was found that out of all the Napster users questioned, almost half had increased their music purchasing since using the application. But if global sales have been falling, how can this be?
See the concluding part of this article next week for Andrew Benfield’s answers to this question. In the meantime, the author welcomes further debate of the issues raised here. You can contact him via a_benfield@yahoo.com
