Music File-Sharing #2
June 14th, 2002 by freddie96
Corporate control or flourishing diversity? Andrew Benfield concludes his investigation into the future of the music industry
A search for Cinematic Orchestra, the downtempo jazz outfit who have just released their second album, ‘Everyday’ on Ninja Tune, reveals how widespread file-sharing has become. Within ten seconds the results come back, with several of the album’s tracks available for download. Instead of sounding the alarm at Ninja Tune, founder Peter Quicke admits that file-sharing ‘has helped promote our records’. Indeed, several of the tracks available on WinMX, one of the more popular file-sharing applications, were placed on the internet by the label themselves.
This embracing of the internet’s power to get your music heard by new audiences is the side of the file-sharing argument rarely heard and seems to be working for small genres like downtempo that struggle to gain access to traditional marketing channels like radio and TV. Ownership of these channels resides with – you’ve guessed it – the Big Five. So instead of being a terrible threat, file-sharing is actually helping to spread diversity into a conservative and fairly monotone musical culture industry.
The effect of internet sampling has been documented in research conducted by the Universities of Connecticut and New York, who studied how file-sharing technology has changed the make-up of the Billboard charts between 1991 and 2000. The results revealed that the number of new artists in the charts increased by 31.5% over the whole period, with 10% of that rise happening between 1998 and 2000. The study described how file-sharing allows sampling of music on a huge scale and that this is having a dual effect on the music industry. On one hand the major pop acts, whose albums usually contain 2 or 3 hit singles, are being traded heavily by music listeners who are unwilling to spend money on a couple of hits and a lot of filler. Meanwhile the cost-free nature of file-sharing encourages people to sample unknown artists and the study found that discovering music this way was more likely to lead to a purchase.
To test this alternative theory of file-sharing culture, take the case of ‘Gauge’, one of the so-called ‘pirates’ responsible for speeding the demise of the recording industry. Gauge is the sort of internet music fan who keeps music industry executives awake at night. Connected to the web via a fast cable connection, he shares 40 gigabytes of data which equates to over 300 albums. To him sampling is a fundamental part of the purchase process: ‘It’s rare that I will take the risk of shelling out notes on something I’ve no idea of the quality, not when I can download it first and take a good listen… and in most cases the majority of tunes on an album are mediocre and not worth a purchase anyway,’ he says.
Whilst obviously a music lover, Gauge is not a lover of the music industry, or the high price of CDs – ‘The RI (recording industry) justify these ridiculous prices on the cost of marketing, distribution, promotion… which leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I know damn well that the artists I’m paying through the nose for are getting very little publicity, and the exorbitant amount of money I’m giving to the publishers is going to get spent promoting S-Club 7′s latest pedestrian commercial offering and a £3 million music video.’ But the simplistic stereotype of ‘pirate’ can’t be applied to Gauge, whose use of file-sharing has ‘undoubtedly led me to purchase music by more obscure and under-publicised artists than any average branch of HMV is capable of housing’. So the net effect of Gauge’s use of file-sharing has been to widen and improve the quality of music he listens to and purchases rather than reducing it.
The more you analyse the arguments of either side of the file-sharing debate, the more it seems that the real battle is over control. The recording industry has built a highly profitable business model based on ‘media synergy’ – the idea that to maximise sales you need to control the whole process of cultural production, from creating content through to how that content is marketed and distributed. The growth of globalisation and the consolidation of this ‘culture machine’ into the hands of just five firms has lead to an increasingly conservative choice of culture, highly marketed, tightly controlled and fervently policed through the mainstream media channels of TV, film and commercial radio.
The difficulty involved in changing that business model has meant that the internet has until recently been ignored by the Big Five, being used instead to open listener’s ears to new alternative sounds via internet radio and file-sharing. As Pork’s Mark Brennand says, ‘one of our strongest links is to an internet radio show which plays a lot of Pork and directs people to our website.’ The results of the Big Five’s inaction are clear – control over what we hear and how we hear it has been lost and previously underground sounds are flourishing without even registering on the traditional media ‘radar’. The results of their action, especially in the area of copyright protection legislation and copy-protected CDs, are less clear, however, and potentially far more damaging.
To copy and share, whether it be music, words or even ideas, is a basic human instinct and is crucial to the development and evolution of culture and society at large. In recent months, academics from all areas have come out attacking the short-sighted measures being used by the recording industry. Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first PC spreadsheet, believes that CD copy-protection ‘will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works’. By stopping copying in its tracks, cultural works will only be in existence as long as the owner wants them to be. In the case of music, this means for as long as it is profitable, or more worrying for as long as the publisher is in business.
The Stanford University technology law professor Lawrence Lessig believes that with new laws in the USA and Europe giving increased powers to copyright owners, ‘the period of copyright primacy is going to end up as a huge hole in the cultural record’. Most agree that these actions are little more than a quick fix to help maintain the existing business models used in the cultural industry that have benefited a powerful few.
Certainly the answer also doesn’t lie with the legitimate Napster-style subscription-based online services being currently launched by the Big Five. Sony and Universal’s PressPlay will allow the user to download from their bulky back catalogues for a variable fee, but still will not allow CD burning or portability to MP3 players. And as one commentator puts it : ‘When was the last time you heard someone get excited by a trip to the library?’
With the current pace of technology, the changes in law and copy-protection are only likely to have a limited effect on file-sharing. The future lies with labels like Tru Thoughts, the Brighton home to successful downtempo artists like Bonobo, Quantic and Jon Kennedy. Label manager Paul Jonas says the label sees its music ‘as a lifelong commitment and ensure any artists we manage or release are the same’, and cites the success of Bonobo as an example of a career artist: ‘Bonobo sold nearly as many as Posh Spice, but [unlike her] will still be selling in 10 years.’ The benefits of this business model are the additional revenue streams which can be generated by a career artist, through licensing deals with TV, adverts and movies, as well as lucrative club nights and DJ fees. As Paul says, ‘there are alternatives to getting to number one.’
While the emphasis for change and radical thinking clearly lies with the recording industry, the advent of new technology like Final Scratch throws up further moral dilemmas for the gatekeepers of musical culture – the DJ. Stanton’s Final Scratch allows DJs to mix MP3 like vinyl, using standard DJ record decks but replacing the record box with a laptop PC. This will allow DJs to take their complete music collection to every gig, whilst only carrying a laptop instead of crates of vinyl. The introduction of such technology will force DJs and all music fans to make a choice between viewing music as a piece of someone’s creative expression or as simply another product to which the usual rules of the market apply. Good music isn’t a product of a machine or factory – it has a face and a history and is a symbol of creative human endeavour. A cultural leap will have to happen which re-establishes the link between the listener and the producer instead of the current situation where listeners often view themselves as passive consumers, futile in the face of the huge mega-corporations that control culture.
But all the work doesn’t need to come from the side of the listener alone. The major labels, in this crazy world where irony is our staple diet, don’t even have to pretend that their ‘acts’ (see Pop Idols) are artificially created. They revel in exploiting people’s acceptance of mediocrity in music – using the tools of big business to engineer throwaway culture and icons. In doing this, however, the labels are hastening their own demise. They’ve created the very beast that will end up devouring them, for when people perceive that something is so artificial, over-produced and over-marketed to the point of being unreal, why should they feel any guilt in downloading it from the internet for free? In the words of our internet ‘pirate’ Gauge, ‘The true skill of the musician has been belittled, capitalised on and exploited to the point that its devaluation was inevitable.’
A crucial evolutionary battle will therefore take place over the next two years between the existing music industry, which due to its financial muscle will continue to be appeased by government, and the listener, aided by tools such as file-sharing and internet radio. If the industry wins, we’ll be faced with ever more intrusive copyright laws that will threaten to make criminals of online music fans whilst simultaneously consigning a period of our cultural heritage to oblivion. If the listener wins, the music industry will be forced to undo its massive consolidation and emulate the proactive business models being adopted by labels such as Pork, Tru Thoughts and Ninja Tune. Hopefully this might lead to a richer and more diverse musical landscape. Certainly we deserve as much.
Andrew Benfield
The author welcomes further debate of the issues raised here. You can contact him via a_benfield@yahoo.com
