Commentary: Music Industry vs. Music Downloaders (9-30-02)

Dave Addleson of E! News Daily had a report last Friday the 27th (Monthly Weird Al Day) about the new advertising campaign by the musicians to influence (brainwash) the MP3 downloaders to stop downloading their songs off the Internet.

The music industry is hurting by their own hand. Sales are down and are continuing to sink as we speak. The reason? An antiquated sales model and pricing method that's of no value to the music consumers. Another reason? Corporate commercial radio is not exposing the songs the music fans would like to buy and hear on their radio stations. That's a two-pronged blow to the music industry as a whole (not just the five big record corporations but also the independents).

Several hundred thousand music fans are in a quest to find and seek new, unusual, off the wall, and rare recordings that are nowhere to be heard on mainstream radio while corporate radio is playing only the much-hyped "big time" acts that are paid to the radio stations by the indies who in turn get paid by the big record labels. This has apparently turned off many music fans from corporate radio and most have found file-sharing sites that allow them to get them exposed to music by artist they want to hear but radio doesn't bother to play.

Among the thousand sub-genres downloaded are blues, celtic, folk, calypso, rock-jazz, polka, euro pop dance, rock-country, and comedy. Many of which commercial radio is afraid to play because they think it will turn off their listeners. Listeners, in fact, are turned off by overrepetetion of soundalike genres and lack of variety by corporate radio, many of which live solely on MP3 downloads and CD purchases instead of radio.

Comedy recordings, made famous by Dr. Demento's radio show, are full of independent artists who have recordings on small labels way outside the five major recod company loop, many of which do the music on the side while others hope to make the sales of their CDs help support them on their own. If the comedy music fans cannot sample their works through Dr. Demento, Internet radio, or MP3 downloads, then how can the independent artists hope to make money off the music if the comedy music fan cannot sample their songs enough for them to burn-in their memories and eventually turn the listener into a buyer?

Many people like me taped songs off the radio in their late teens and early adult lives while strugging through learning institutions, and back in the early 80s, all I could afford were cheap 39 cent cassette tapes from Longs Drugs where I taped some 500 songs off of Dr. Demento's radio show and some 500 more rock-punk-dance songs off of commercial radio. The recordings off the radio, aside of the taking into the music parts, were basically crummy in fidelity, but that was the only way I could play the songs I like over and over again until they either burned in and I liked it enough to eventually buy them on CDs when I got more money, or until they just plain wore out and I just said fuggedabuttit.

Fast forward to the late 90s and early 00s, and it's basically the same thing with teenagers and college students who are short on money. Like me, they're fans of music too, only the preferred medium has changed. Back in the 80s, commerical radio had more variety, and of course, since ownership was limited to two stations per market, and 14 overall, there was a lot of competetion for stations to get your ears to their radio waves. Now with Clear Channel running 1227 stations that all basically sound alike playing just 2-3 genres in their formats with much emphasis on old music the average teen don't care to explore, the Internet is their preferred medium to get them exposed to new sounds, only without the wait to download their favorite songs hours after they request it on the radio.

Will today's struggling students who tape and download music eventually buy the CDs when they get more money and have a better recording of it anyway? Very likely, unless the acts turn them off with their record labels' stupid brainwashing campaign to make them look like criminals. Was I a criminal when I tape the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." on a cassette off KROQ in 1978? Nope. So why is it a crime when I download the same song off the Internet onto my computer? I have the Sex Pistols "Nevermind the Bullocks" CD whence the song came. Is it a crime to download or tape whether you own the CD or not?

Now if you believe the five major music corporations, it's because of the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have downloaded individual songs from the Internet to their computers.

Subsequently, those five hurting corporations recruited their star players to essentially teach and scold the active music fans who made them stars in the first place. To me, it's a weird one.

Says some of the artists, "if you create something, and someone takes it away without permission, it's stealing." Says another, "it may seem innocent enough, but everytime you illegally download music, a songwriter doesn't get paid." Says another, "making an album is a team effort, so if somebody pirates a record, they're not only cheating the artists, but also the people who work on it."

They're talking about downloading music off the Internet and they're doing it in a multi-million dollar industry advertising campaign which features full page ads for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Video presentations which show declining sales and music industry-funded studies which show how downloaders don't buy music. There are also industry-hired columnists who say wordings such as "what happens when you illegally download, you're depriving the industry of revenue."

Naturally they're questioning whether downloading really impact record sales, or is it the proliferation of CD burners and the ability to copy CDs purchased at a store. And how will a massive community of music fans react to their favorite artists telling them to abandon technology which is already fully integrated and engrained within the culture of the music lovers?

Now if you go into Tower Records, slip a CD in your jacket, and walk out without paying for it, that is stealing. It's depriving the employees their paycheck. If you download the same song off the radio or tape if off the radio, why isn't that called stealing? Why isn't the taper/downloader paying $3 for each song they record? Should the RIAA go after people who tape songs off the radio onto cassette decks too? If taping songs off the radio for private use is called "Fair Use", then so is downloading MP3s off the Internet. The music fans want to let the songs burn into their heads with repeated plays, and decide if they like it or if it sucks. Let the music fans vote for the artists with their pocketbooks. How? By having everyone put the proper artist information on all MP3s, which many people don't do or are often left blank in some places.

The top five artists of the week: Arvil Levine, Dixie Chicks, Disturbed, Eminem, and Nelly.

Note that Eminem and Arvil Levine are in the Top 5 Sales Chart just like they are in the downloaded artist chart courtesy of the company Big Champagne (where did they get that information?)

Look, guys, we see an active audience downloading AND buying. Let's talk about this recording industry campaign against music downloading. For every study that the music industry commissioned, several including one by Forrester called "Downloads Save the Music Business", and one by Dan Brickman which is brilliant because it argues the same thing. This according to Dave Addelson who reported on E!

Newsflash folks: you can't stop music downloading. The genie is out of the bottle and you can't put it in again. Why would you want to? Hundreds of millions of people have embraced this technology, and these downloaders are music BUYERS. So if it's not downloading, why is the music industry suffering?

The record industry is still living in the 20th century with its business model that still charges over $15 for a CD that no longer seems like a good value when you compare it to the common DVDs which really give you an entire film for a comparative price.

Back in the early days, a teen could buy a single for less than a buck and get a song on each side of the disk. What happened to the good old cheap single? Not even the CD singles are cheap enough for the person who wants to buy just the one song to convince them to not tape them off the radio or download the song from the Internet without paying for it. If the big record companies could start putting 2-3 songs (not the one song and remixes of the same song) from the artist on a 3 1/2 inch CD single and pricing them for $1 each, they could rejuvinate the sales for people who prefer to buy just the hit song off the album.

And then guys, how about these. There are CD burners out there and they're here to stay. You can take a new CD and copy it. You can get blank CDs for as little as 20 cents a CD-R in packs of 50 or 100, even as low as a dime per CD with rebates. Suddenly, the record industry is paying for its dependence on a product, the CD, which no longer has the same value to consumers. You can fit 15-20 songs that you prefer to hear on a CD for less than a dollar as long as you are willing to labor through the time of downloading the MP3s, converting them to WAV format, burning them as CD-Audio discs. Some prefer to fit 120 MP3s encoded at 128kbps on a single CD-R just so they can take them to work and have ten-hours of MP3 music instead of 80 minutes of CD Audio.

Now as for the artists who are scolding their fan bases for downloading and loving their music, I hope those fans don't hold it against you. It seems like a bad career move to me.

These are music lovers for a whole new world and a whole new age of music. The culture has changed. The music industry is going to have to get with it.

Yet the recording industry of america and the big five record labels are still blaming their downslide in sales to music trading on the Internet when its really a lack of quality of their over-marketed pop music "stars" to an unreceptive audience who would rather seek out music other than the likes of rap-influenced rock and R&B that gets most of the coverage. The big five labels don't like the fact that the musicians on the independent labels are stealing the CD money by making their own music freely downloadable to people who are interested in checking out their product (for lack of radio airplay) and the music fans shelling out the money on the independent artist's CDs instead of on the CDs representing one of the big five record labels.

The big five labels want to shut down your ability to download MP3s off the Internet because it's not really stealing. It's because the music from the independent labels are competeting with music representing their labels, and when you give the music fans a choice between a corporate-manufactured soundalike "star" and a low-budget original that has warmth and spirit, the music fan will choose the latter instead of the soundalike that they've already heard a thousand times through corporate radio.

Now the RIAA is pushing new legislation that would grant it "Big Brother" abilities to wreak havoc on your computer by secretly searching your hard rives for MP3s is the RIAA suspects that the individual is pirating music either way.

The RIAA sued various ISPs, trying to force them to block access to sites the RIAA accues of hosting pirated music. The RIAA even sued ISPs to try to have individuals it suspected of trading music online kicked off the Internet.

If anything, the RIAA has become more like Communist China than the Democratic U.S.A.

The RIAA claims that getting copies of MP3s is stealing music, when in fact, they're swimming in pools of consumers' dollars generated by overpriced $15-20 CDs, yet the musicians that represent the big five labels often go in dire poverty even as the RIAA states that stealing MP3s hurts the musicians. I smell a rat here. Why aren't most of the musicians themselves rolling in dough with all the copyright entitlements in place? Blame it on the record labels who sign them up and don't do anything to get their works publicized through the media. If the music fans don't sample their works anywhere, how can they consider buying what they don't hear?

That's where the MP3 download comes into play, fools. The fans seek out the music if its available, download it, listen to it, and decide if it basically rules or sucks. The fans want value in the CDs they are buying, and if they don't see it, they don't consider buying it. If Bruce Springsteen is worth $20 for a CD, the consumer will gladly pay it, but one thing you have to understand is that the price of a CD today is comparable to the price of a music cassette 20 years ago when adjusted for inflation, in fact, the price of a 50 minute CD priced at $15 is the same as a 50 minute cassette at $8 or LP at $7 back in 1977. Even at those exhorborant prices, the CD if its full of worthy tracks, is priced reasonably, but the music fan doesn't if all he likes are one or two cuts off the album and thinks that it's way overpriced and it should be something like $2-$3 instead.

That is what the record industry needs to do: bring back the singles for $2, even $1 in some cases, and let the consumers get a good-sounding song that sounds far better than an MP3 encoded at the common 128kbps rate, and the ASCAP/BMI writers get paid for their work, but the label has to get the word out about the music to the potential buyer/music fan. If not radio, then the MP3 download is the only other solution.

Some people don't have the time to download the 128kbps song if all they want to do is to sample it. Have the record company make either short 30-second 128kbps samples, or let them download a 24kbps mono version of the song that sounds like AM radio. Also, the record companies also have to take into account that there are plenty of people who don't download MP3s off the Internet, and their older music audiences are often too busy to sample radio when all it plays is teen-oriented new music. If these elder music fans can be convinced to come to a RIAA-sanctioned MP3 download website somehow, they can sample some of the signed but rarely-heard of artists that they might like according to their tastes.

Use the MP3s as a marketing tool by encoding all the album and artist information on the song in the ID3 tags of the MP3s. They could also "deejay" the artist and title of the song by making it into a commercial for the CD that they are selling. People of all ages do buy CDs, but only if they're convinced that there is sufficent value in justifying the cost of buying the CD in the first place, and all the Internet tricks in the world isn't going to do anybody good if the downloaded MP3 lasts only 30 days or they have to pay a nickel for each play of the song.

More and more unsigned bands who don't get regular radio exposure are embracing the MP3 download technology as a way to publicize their works without having to sign over their paychecks to music-biz moguls. If an independent artist is selling the CDs full of their own copyrighted works themselves, they keep all the money that goes into the sale of each CD. If the artist is signed with a major label, all they get is a contract and a flat payment, and perhaps a trickle of royalties based on how many CDs they sold. That's what's wrong with the big label industry. The so-called crusaders of the musicians aren't sufficently taking care of their own. If the artist has sold only about 100 CDs, that's what is it? Only $7 to the artist if, and only if, he is a member of ASCAP or BMI, which distributes the royalties to the songwriters, composers, and publishers. If the artist is just a singer, than they don't get the royalties. So how can the RIAA claim to represent the artists if plenty of those who don't represent ASCAP or BMI don't get anything no matter how many of the CDs with the singer's name on it sells?

Fans are pissed off at the RIAA and are fighting back with websites such as http://www.boycottriaa.com. The website is a collection of consumer rage against the corporate record machine's tactics of the music industry. The website also has resources such as how to let Congress know how you feel about some of the idiotic proposals as well as speaking your mind to the Justice Department over its unwillingness to protect citizens from anarchic behavior by the big five record companies.

So the fact that private citizens and independent artists sharing their music over the Internet is here to stay. The intelligent record exec is the one who finds a way to use music sharing to publicize their works they have a right to distribute. If they don't do that job, the music fans will, but either case, if the music gets exposed to the right music fan (as in one who buys music), then the free publicity gets translated into dollars for the record label.

The more the music industry digs its heels and targets individual Americans for persecution and prosecution, the more likely it will lose music fans it may never win back.