ed quillen
So what if the recording industry dies?
By Ed Quillen
The recording industry in this country claims to be hurting, and so it plans lawsuits against people who share music files on their computers.
The financial pain looks real. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, CD sales declined 7 percent in the first six months of this year, compared to the first half of 2002.
What caused this? The RIAA says that people aren't buying as many discs these days because they're finding the music they want on file-sharing services like Kazaa and Grokster. The songs are free, and people can get just the song they want, instead of paying $16.95 for a disc with the song they want and a dozen lame tracks.
However, that can't account for all of the decline. Consider my experience with the finest rock 'n' roll album ever made, "Exile on Main Street" by the Rolling Stones. I bought it on vinyl in 1972, on cassette tape in 1988 and on CD in 1997.
This continued purchasing of the same music is worthwhile in that it helps keep Keith Richards alive so that he serves as a continuing rebuke to the "zero tolerance" mob. But there's a limit; once I've got the music on CD, that's as good as it gets.
Since CD technology appeared in 1981, the industry hasn't contrived a superior medium. As for the "digitally re-mastered" re-releases and the like which continue to emerge, I'm 52 and my hearing is such that I wouldn't be able to appreciate the difference, no matter how refined the source.
Multiply me and my discs by millions of other graying baby boomers who used to buy lots of CDs to upgrade their collections, and you've got an explanation for the music industry's sales curve. For years, the industry could make tons of money just selling us stuff we'd already bought at least once before. The industry could do this without investing in new talent or finding new audiences or developing new technology.
Now we baby boomers have pretty well completed the replacement of other media with CDs. The RIAA responds by blaming the sales decline on file-sharing; a few years ago, the industry went after the first big service, Napster.
I hadn't paid much attention to Napster until I read about the litigation and how the service faced imminent closure. Under those circumstances I naturally had to try it.
But the songs I downloaded weren't ones I'd have purchased; if I'd wanted to buy them, I'd have already gone to a local shop.
Based on that experience, and on what friends tell me about their own music downloading, I suspect this attitude is fairly widespread. In that case, the RIAA's claim of losing billions of dollars in potential sales to free downloads is specious - those are sales that never would have happened, with or without free downloads.
By using this dubious claim of economic loss, the RIAA initially went to court with the idea of getting a judge to rule that file-sharing technology was itself illegal. But in April, a federal judge in Los Angeles sensibly ruled that peer-to-peer file-sharing was in itself perfectly legal.
Thus thwarted in that effort to control our personal computers, the RIAA announced last week that it's taking a new tack - searching for songs in the file-sharing services open to the public, issuing subpoenas to Internet service providers to get customer records, then suing the file-sharers for copyright infringement.
On the legislative front, the entertainment industry in 2001 got one of its lackeys, Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., to propose a law that would have mandated copy-protection hardware in every computer. That came after the Digital Millenium Copyright Protection Act, which made it illegal even to talk about how copy-protection technology works - a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Now another lackey, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said on June 17 that he'd like to see technology that would destroy computers that shared copyrighted material. "If that's the only way to do it," he said, "then I'm all for destroying their machines."
And if I lose a year of work on my Great American Novel because of a bug in the Hatch program, where do I turn for relief?
Let's take the RIAA at its word that the industry might die on account of new technology. And so what? It was born of a new technology (Thomas Edison's phonograph), and if new technology kills it, note that we have survived the loss of other worthy old technologies, from steam locomotives to manual typewriters.
Musicians would have to play music to earn their keep, and fans would find ways to keep the music flowing. Lackey senators would have to find a new source of campaign contributions, but they'd manage. Meanwhile, we could go back to using our computers without any help from Big Brother.
Ed Quillen of Salida (
[email protected]) ) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
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