Digital Music and the Internet
January 25th, 2011 | By
I came across a New York Times article recently with the headline “Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable”. The article discussed the idea that digital music sales have reached their peak, blaming piracy for the general decline in music sales. Music executives in particular have singled out piracy as the problem and stricter law enforcement as the solution to the decline of music sales.
Without considering the legal or ethical issues regarding music piracy, I have to disagree with the record industry’s assessment of this situation. The record labels are trying to pass the problem to internet service providers and law enforcement, but the problem lies at the source – the record labels themselves. Despite their best efforts to portray themselves as the victims, the labels are primarily responsible for the weakness of digital music sales. Their story is one of missed opportunity and a blatant disregard for consumer demand and technological innovation.
To understand how we arrived at this point, it’s necessary to understand the historical context of digital music distribution. One of the pivotal events in digital music was the launch and subsequent explosion of Napster, which helped bring about a new era of peer to peer file and music sharing, as well as the widespread adoption of the MP3 standard. Napster offered a basic example of what music consumers wanted in a digital service; the ability to search by keyword, artist, song name, album, genre, etc. and the ability to easily and quickly download the content you were looking for.
Instead of recognizing the value of Napster as a concept, the labels reaction was as simple as it was shortsighted; just shut it down and sue its creator, Sean Parker. After all, people will forget all about Napster if it no longer exists, right?
You know the rest of the story…once music consumers were hip to MP3s and digital file sharing, they would use any outlet they could find to replace CDs with MP3s. Naturally, the record industry was still focused on selling CDs (even as the iPod made them irrelevant), missing the most obvious opportunity in their own industry as hundreds of file sharing services were created to fill the void left by Napster. Many have already been shut down, including Kazaa, Limewire, and others; meanwhile they have been replaced by the Bit Torrent protocol, making piracy next to impossible to stop as centralized file sharing has evolved into decentralized, peer to peer sharing.
I sympathize with the record labels – I really do. I think they provide a valuable service for some artists, supporting their work with distribution, advertising, promotion, and other behind-the-scenes services. I also believe that independent labels and artists themselves can achieve success on their own terms, especially using the power of new technologies like social media and digital music distribution. Streaming subscription services like Spotify (only available in Europe) and Pandora show what is possible, if only the labels would realize that such innovative and increasingly popular services are in their best interests.
My problem with the major record labels is that they go about solving their own problems in the worst way possible – by trying to censor and control the internet. The record industry has launched an all-out war on internet freedom, pushing for selective government censorship on behalf of corporations, which is both unprecedented and unacceptable to governing principals of the internet. The founder of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, said it the best:
We use the web now for all kinds of parts of our lives, some trivial, some critical to our life as part of a social world…In the spirit going back to Magna Carta, we require a principal that: No person or organization shall be deprived of their ability to connect to others at will without due process of law, with the presumption of innocence until found guilty. Neither governments nor corporations should be allowed to use disconnection from the Internet as a way of arbitrarily furthering their owns aims.
The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is being pushed by the major record labels, who claim that they need the authority to blacklist any website (including Youtube and similar sites) in order to stop online music piracy. This is a ridiculous assertion and it stands against both the founding principals of the internet itself and the First Amendment right to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Speech. Copyright protection is important, but Internet freedom is necessary and must be protected. To learn more about COICA, check out these links:
