In record revolution, industry spins badly
by Thomas Keane Jr.
Friday,
The music
industry has shocked local colleges and universities with subpoenas demanding
access to students' computer records. It's the latest legal skirmish by an
industry seemingly bent on self-destruction, a $40 billion business that has
alienated its customers, doesn't understand technology and is stuck with a
business model that no longer makes sense.
The RIAA - the Recording Industry
Association of America - represents the music industry (which itself is
dominated by five major companies: BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner). And
over the last few years, it has become obsessed, almost pathologically so, with
a burgeoning phenomenon: the sharing of music files.
If you've never done this -
in other words, if you're older than 30 - the process is simple.
On a computer, one can treat
songs as data files, similar to word-processing documents. Most every computer
has the ability to copy songs from a compact disc (called ``ripping'') and
store them (in various formats such as ``MP3''). Then - and this is the part
the RIAA hates - users can share the songs with anyone else through the
Internet, using readily available software such as Kazaa.
The industry blames music
sharing - ``piracy,'' it alleges - for recent declines in CD sales, which is
why it's going after the schools' records.
It wants to identify the
so-called pirates and prosecute them. And although a few colleges such as MIT
and Boston College are challenging the subpoenas, it seems likely the RIAA
eventually will be able to get the information it wants.
There is, by the way, a hot
debate over whether music sharing really is to blame for lagging music sales.
Some point to the recession, recent price jumps in CDs and the simply wretched
quality of most modern music as more likely causes. Moreover, they argue, the
ready sharing of songs may act as a form of promotion for new music.
Still, even if music sharing
is not now having much of an impact on CD sales, it will eventually. The lure
isn't that the music is free. It's that CDs - the method the industry relies
upon to sell its product - don't make sense.
Think about it.
People don't really want to
``own'' music. Rather they simply want to be able to listen to music of their
choosing. In a sense, the ideal would be something like a commercial-free radio
station where you could be the disc jockey - your own personal jukebox, if you will.
CDs offer none of that. You
have to buy an entire CD with 10 to 12 songs, even if only one or two are
appealing (CD singles are less than 1 percent of all CDs sold). Moreover, you
pay the same price no matter how good or bad the artist and no matter how many
times you listen to the song.
Meanwhile, the technology to
create the ideal solution - the personal jukebox - is tantalizingly close
(Apple's iPOD, the latest model of which can hold the equivalent of 600 CDs in
a device smaller than a pack of playing cards, gives a hint of that future).
It's not hard to imagine an online music player that could give you access to
all of the music ever recorded, a device that could work anywhere you wanted -
in the car, walking along the street or at home.
The problem, of course, is
that such technologies essentially mean that the existing industry collapses.
They upend the whole notion of selling music by the album. CDs are no more.
Stores such as Virgin or Tower are closing their doors.
Moreover, there is the very
real issue of how to get consumers using new technologies to pay for their
music. Some companies have begun to explore the idea of micro-payments (paying
by the number of times a song is heard).
Apple Computer recently
launched an online music store, iTunes, which allows one to download songs for
99 cents each.
Still, the RIAA
fundamentally believes that its customers - largely the young - are pirates;
given a chance, they'll steal music rather than pay for it. (This makes the
music industry and perhaps the penal system the only two businesses that
believe all of their customers are crooks.)
Even as it devises new ways
to copy protect its products, the RIAA figures clever college students and
hackers will crack the codes.
So it's understandable why the
music industry is fighting so hard. If it loses, it's out of business. College
students, who essentially created the modern recording industry with the rock
'n' roll revolution in the 1960s, may be responsible for another revolution -
the destruction of that same industry.
And then what? Does music
die? The surprising answer is that music - as opposed to the music industry -
may be better off. That's the subject of my next column.
Talk back to Tom Keane at