Thursday, September 11, 2003  

Look, the RIAA’s current all-out legal Blitzkreig has nothing to do whatsoever with protecting artists from copyright infringement. If you read Janis Ian’s excellent essays about the music industry, you see that artists don’t make money from CD sales anyway. They make their money playing tour dates. Even without that factual basis, I think everyone’s gut can tell that a group that would sue a 12-year old girl doesn’t really give two shits about art.

So listen up: I think the RIAA is thinking LONG TERM. And some very smart suit monkey over there has figured out that the Internet in general and peer-to-peer networks specifically represent an alternative distribution system for music that can (and will) completely circumvent the current model that, and this is the important part, makes the RIAA their money.

You can’t want music you don’t know exists. That is to say that by the time you decide you want a copy of a song, you’ve heard it, or at least heard of it, and right now, that happens because an artist gets signed to a label, which produces the album and creates some sort of marketing campaign and makes sure it gets airplay and MTV time and shelf space at the Big Stores and whatnot, and all along that winding road, money is being made and spent. Lots of people are getting rich off the process, and your purchase price goes into that bottomless kitty. You buy what you’re told is available to buy...you’re given a selection, sure, but it’s still a carefully controlled selection. You only get to choose from a pile that makes the RIAA some cash (again: not the artist).

One side effect of this is that some really, really, really good music that would, in fact, be really, really, really popular if only people actually knew it existed gets excluded from that pile, and consequently, you and I never hear it, and by extension, never buy it. The RIAA doesn’t care about those artists, because those artists don’t make any money for the RIAA. And since they’re locked out of the system, the RIAA doesn’t have to pay any attention to them.

But imagine instead the World’s Greatest Rock Band, which is producing the Best Goddamn Rock and Roll Ever Heard but hasn’t gotten signed to a label and is therefore excluded from the road to fame and glory (minus the stiff corporate cut) outlined above. What if that band takes a 4-track recorder and a copy of Sound Forge and produces 6 or 8 of The Best Rock and Roll Songs In History by themselves (no major label studio is getting any dough), burns them to CD (takes 10 minutes), makes some cover art (everyone’s got Photoshop), manufactures a few thousand copies (there are only about a million companies that’ll do this for under a grand), rips some MP3’s (easy peasy), puts them up on their own website (anybody under 30 can make a website in their sleep these days), voluntarily shares them via Kazaa (so no copyright problems, dig?), and emails them to every home-made Internet radio station on Shoutcast they can find, whereupon they become an Overnight Sensation, which drives thousands of people to their aforementioned website, where they sell their own CD directly to the consumer, who has now ACTUALLY done something good for the artist and gotten much better music than they would have by buying the Band du Jour’s CD at their local Virgin Music Superstore.

It hasn’t happened yet; but it’s going to.

Again, the important thing is that this new model represents a method for music production and distribution that doesn’t need the RIAA (or HMV, or Sony Music, or the Creative Artists Agency) for even one second. Maybe CD sales are down due to piracy (the numbers are equivocal), but it won’t be long before CD sales are down because people are buying music that isn’t measured by Arbitron ratings or Tower Records receipts. Not too far in the future, a whole lot of musicians are going to circumvent the entire corporate structure and get the entire benefit of their album sales. Hell, ravers and club kids are doing it already. Some of the best tracks I’ve heard lately (and found via creative Kazaa searches) were produced by some 17-year-old in his basement. If he had a CD, you betcha I’d buy it, and Eminem can go pound sand.

The RIAA isn’t out to protect artists from music piracy, they’re out to prevent a level playing field. They’re afraid of the competition, and they damned well ought to be. They’re trying to shut down swapping now so that we don’t develop a taste for it . They don’t want us to get in the habit of turning to this alternative distribution system, because in a few years, when thousands and thousands of unsigned artists are making for a much more diverse marketplace, if we’re comfortable using it, they know they’re going to lose.

If Metallica’s worried about what happens when people use the Internet to share their songs for free, they ought to be petrified about what’s going to happen when people use the Internet to discover some bands that still rock.