IN CASE YOU’VE BEEN STUCK INSIDE all summer and haven’t heard the news, there’s this little software company called Napster.
It’s caused no end of whoop-de-do because its users can exchange recorded-music files online without the express written consent of the gargantuan record labels.
The gargantuan record labels are suing, trying to shut Napster down. They’re asking the judges, and the public at large, to forget all about five decades’ worth of label malfeasance and just plain theft from recording artists, and instead to see the labels as standing up for poor musicians’ right to earn a living from their art.
Support the labels, the labels’ claim goes, and you’re helping bass players stay in guitar picks and tour-van repairs.
Let Napster continue to exist, the labels allege, and no recording artist will ever see a CD royalty again.
Some Internet commentators, including
John Perry Barlow (who doesn’t always take sides against huge corporations, being pals with the Big Oil-funded Global Business Network), have retorted that argument. Instead, these guys claim musicians don’t need no stinkin’ major record labels. Heck, they don’t even need to sell records to earn a living.
For an example of a band that didn’t need to eternally assert its intellectual property rights, Barlow and co. always mention the same band–the Grateful Dead, for whom Barlow was once an associate (as, briefly, was Courtney Love’s dad).
The Dead, Barlow and pals assert, became rock’s number-one touring act partly because they let fans make and exchange their own recordings of their live shows. So, these writers claim, could any other act. Artists not only should let live-show tapes be freely traded, but studio CD tracks as well; it’d all just fan the flames of fandom, which would result in further CD and ticket sales.
Barlow and his cohorts conveniently forget to mention that the Dead released their records through major labels that routinely included the usual threats on the back cover about unauthorized duplication being a violation of applicable laws.
They also don’t mention that the Dead were quite the intellectual-property defenders in regard to the band’s assorted merchandising images and logos. At one point, the band’s attorneys even tried to sue individual Deadheads who sold handmade bear-mascot bongs in the caravan camps outside the band’s shows.
The larger issue in Barlow’s argument, however, lies in what made the Dead different from most rock bands before or since. They were a “jam band,” using long instrumental doodles to make each live show different (thus encouraging hardcore fans to see as many different gigs as possible)
Some current “jam bands” include Phish and Pearl Jam, which just released 25 (count ’em!) live CDs, billed as affordable alternatives to high-priced bootlegs.
Acts that hew closer to tighter performing and songwriting, or acts that have chosen not to tour much, might not get as much out of a freer show-taping and song-trading philosophy. And acts that don’t rely on tours and merchandising sales to pay the rent (many non-jam bands lose money on the road) might not like to hear that they’re now expected to give up record sales and rely on touring income.
Or so one might think.
The Offspring, whose skate-punk sound and terse songwriting are as about far from the Dead as one can get, (heart) Napster. Or, to quote from the band’s official website, “The Offspring view MP3 technology and programs such as Napster as being a vital and necessary means to promote music and foster better relationships with our fans.”
The band’s sold Napster-branded merchandising items at its shows (with proceeds earmarked for charity). And it wanted to put its entire next album online, as downloadable MP3 files, until the gargantuan record label that has the band under contract threatened to sue. The compromise: The band put up a single tune.
Other acts, particularly acts without big-label deals (voluntarily or otherwise), have posted lotsa songs for free download–even entire albums and live shows. Or they’ve let unofficial fan sites post them.
They’re convinced this will get them noticed, draw new fans, and turn those new fans into legit CD buyers.
Fifties rock songwriter Mike Stoller, meanwhile, wrote an NY Times op-ed essay last week. He claimed unfettered Net-downloading of music would put future songwriters out of business. Stoller neglects to mention that full-time songwriters were largely ousted from the rock milieu back in the ’60s. After the Beatles and Stones, most bands started writing their own material.
A big reason: The ASCAP- and BMI-regulated songwriting royalties were a much surer source of income than recording royalties, which were and are subject to all manner of record-label “creative accounting.” Non-performing songwriters either became nostalgia topics or moved into niche markets (country, teen-idol pop).
It’s the major-label business-as-usual that, at least indirectly, helped put the likes of Stoller out of business. It’s that kind of business-as-usual that Napster really threatens.
We close with a line cribbed from the late ’80s and early ’90s, when the gargantuan record labels were similarly up in arms over cassette trading. The labels would stick slogans on back covers, “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.”
Members of the “international cassette underground” preferred to spread a revised slogan–“Home taping is killing the music industry. And it’s easy.”
TOMORROW: Imagining a new fictional persona for the column.
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