Back in 1998 the RIAA fashioned itself as a valiant Navy, sinking the pirates that trolled the waters of cyberspace. They sunk Napster, Aimster, and Grockster in high-profile lawsuits, the latter reaching the Supreme Court. When they'd exhausted that route, they began snooping on thousands of internet users and sued the ones they caught swapping copyright songs.
Their strategy was thuggish and always mired in legal ambiguity. They'd send threatening letters. Pay a relatively small fine now, they threatened, or face a devastating lawsuit. Usually, the little people folded. Rarely did a case go to court. When it did, the RIAA always lost. In October 2007, they came as close as ever to victory when a judge ordered a single mother from the Ojibwe tribe of northern Minnesota to pay $222,000 in restitution for sharing 24 songs online. It all fell apart when the judge ordered a re-trial this September, on a technicality that called into question the plantiffs' entire legal underpinning. On Friday the RIAA made their announcement. They would no longer sue individual pirates.
A decade of legal effort, the pinnacle of which was a botched ruining of a divorced Indian, culminated in total failure. I can go online right this minute and download a perfectly good copy of Opeth's "My Arms, Your Hearse." Singer-songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt will never see a dime for it.
It hasn't always been possible for me to steal music from a musician. A century and a half ago, music was something one would only experience within earshot of musicians. Only when a musician had a venue could he or anyone else make money for his art. Otherwise he was little more than a bard strumming a lyre.
That all changed with the advent of Thomas Edison's phonograph cylinder. Suddenly, music was a tangible commodity. Music was a wax tube. After a few improvements on the basic concept, one could listen to music in a car, in bed, or at work, and flip between songs almost instantly. Furthermore, the expanded exposure that the recording allowed helped fill venues all around the world.
But the very technology that made music a commodity improved so much that music once again became nearly intangible. Bits float through cyberspace like waves float from a gently-plucked bouzouki. Only the bits float further, for years, pulled along at the behest of anyone who wants to hear them.
RIAA President Cary Sherman maintains that he won the battle, and that he and his minions are pressing ahead with a new, even vaguer, more pathetic and legally questionable plan to fight pirates "in cooperation with" his former nemeses, the internet service providers. A day after this announcement, Verizon said that it will not cooperate.
The labels and their lobbying group are doomed. The whole edifice of the record company is obsolete. They can do nothing but keep up appearances by waging pointless battles. Their war machine is losing steam every day, because its very enemies are its customers. Whenever a customer doesn't buy an album, he denies the RIAA a couple more dollars with which to sue him. It's a vicious circle.
In this manner, we can hope to see more bands freed from the yokes of the recording industry. They may not make as much money as they have before, because their marketing will be more rudimentary, but the real losers will be the record executives. The winners will be the listeners. People like Puff Daddy will be left standing in the cold. Recordings will become mere promotions, designed to get people to come out to the show. The margins will be minuscule. Perhaps we'll even have to bear "limited commercial interruption" recorded strait into our tracks. Somehow the executives will wring a dime out of the new, barren landscape of digital music.
By the next decade we'll have tossed our undependable, obscenely expensive, primitive compact disks in the landfill, and we'll be listening exclusively to compressed digital files. No one will even bother developing talent, except the real, hard-bitten music eccentrics and geeks.
Even experimental jazz could capture a large portion of market share. We'll all be listening to aimless tenor sax noodling over an didgeridoo, with excellent sound quality, recorded in the garage of the didgeridooist's parents.
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