[Legal background and detailed coverage by David Post of the Volokhs - so very necessary if you like reading about law, which personally bores the shit out of me, but whatever, go read that real stuff there - ]
Wait, what's that, you don't even give a shit because everybody knows that the music industry can't stop file sharing? Jon Pareles, in his NYT's Critics Notebook column, brings up one of many reasons why:
The geek response was decentralized programs like the software behind Grokster and Kazaa. But those are ugly programs because they don't just connect people with files to share; they also install spyware and adware to sell advertising and profit off the traffic in (primarily) copyrighted files. Enter the geeks again, who came up with ways to stop ads from displaying or engineered stripped-down ad-free versions of the software like Kazaa Lite. In a charming move, Kazaa tried to stop distribution of Kazaa Lite, claiming it was a copyright violation. Then the geeks came up with programs that established independent, ad-free networks or, like Bittorrent, facilitated multiple individual connections. The court's decision may torpedo the parasitical, ad-pumping services like Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus, but no one's going to miss them much. There are plenty of geek alternatives that were devised not as business startups, but for the programmers' satisfaction and the users' sense of connection.File sharing software designers learned "don't ask" from the federal court judgment that shut down Napster in 2001. Napster's legal problem was that it could ask, and every request went through a central server, so Napster presumably knew what users were trading, thus abetting copyright infringement.
Pareles also makes an important/interesting observation that segues nicely into what I REALLY wanted to post about other than some meaningless legal footnote to the onward march of 21st century music:
Motives for sharing music and movies are more complex than a grab for free goods... File-sharing software allows people to download without sharing - the logical thing to do if all that matters is getting material free. Yet millions of people open up shared folders anyway (which also opens the sharers up to lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America).Why? To flaunt a collection. To spread the word on music they care about. To give back something for what they get. To feel cool. And while there is no doubt that some people are downloading copies of the latest Mariah Carey album, there are also people who grabbed a track of something they'd never hear on the radio, thus turning them into fans.
As all you internet music thugs out there know, filesharing in all its various shapes and forms has changed the way a lot of people consume music these days, myself included. I vaguely remember a time long ago when my appetite for new music exceeded my income (as well as my knowledge of new kinds of music), but nowadays I am almost drowning in sound, with many gigabytes of MP3s I haven't even really listened to yet - at some point in the past year or two my rate of music acquisition became higher than my rate of music assimilation, and I don't think it'll ever switch back. It's an exhiliarating, but occasionally problematic experience - how can I reconcile traditional metrics of 'cool'/'good' &c like authenticity and expertise with these dil-internet-ettante consumption patterns, where the rich musical history of one decent-sized city (I'm thinking 'Houston') can SEEM to go (this is about perceptions, people, not reality) from 'unknown' to 'amazing and fresh' to 'ubiquitous' to 'kind of cliched' within the span of a few months?
It's like the music version of political blogger Mickey Kaus's Feiler Faster Thesis:
Everybody says competition, plus the Internet, has speeded up the news cycle. You used to watch the evening news once a day, or watch Meet the Press once a week. Now you look at Salon and complain that they've had the same article up for an hour and a half. In this environment, charges and countercharges fly faster. The conventional wisdom forms, and contrarian pundits react against it, and counter-contrarians weigh in, etc., all in a day, instead of over the course of a fortnight...
Listening to music is still just about the most purely transcendental secular/quasi-religious experience available to man and there will always be something eternal and ineffable about it and whatever - but even if music at the end of the day is 'about' a lot more than keeping up with the coolest and most current fashions, a lot more than playing a game where whoever is cool and smart enough to keep up with the ever-more-quickly changing styles wins - well, those things are a big part of it, too. While occasionally kind of obnoxious, on the whole it's a pretty fun and interesting game that generates a lot of worthwhile results, and it's the game that has been creatively and economically driving popular music ever since there was such a thing as popular music.
Which brings me, finally, to Tyler Cowen's excellent post from yesterday (he also posted earlier on why the Grokster ruling won't affect illegal firesharing), which is certainly relevant to the Grokster case but is actually an excerpt from a forthcoming book from Mr. Cowen - an economics professor at George Mason, my mom's alma mater, yeah mom! - about the economics of the arts -
The Internet already helps music companies track fan demands. When fans sample on-line music, usually they can figure out whether or not they would like the entire CD. Many of these fans still buy the CD, to get better sound, to have the music in more convenient form, to receive the packaging, and so on, as discussed above. These fans usually will be happy with their purchases. As a result, it will be harder for the music companies to issue low quality CDs. Of course this tighter monitoring of quality may cause the number of new issues to decline. In nominal terms the industry will shrink, but at the same time it may produce more real value for consumers....it is difficult to judge how a given level of illegal downloads will affect economic efficiency. First, the quantity of music sold in a given year is not a very accurate indicator of how much value consumers receive from music. Fans commonly experiment by buying a number of CDs, only a few of which pay off and become favorites... Whether consumers like what they bought is at least as important as the absolute size of the industry.
Right - as I said in an older post rich musicians and record companies are not an accurate indicator of the amount of good music being made . And, since it's so cheap and easy to make and distribute music these days, I'm sure that any shrinkage of the majors will be more than made up for by new music released independently through mixtapes, the internet, &c.
Cowen's post isn't just about being able to more easily research that new CD purchase with Amazon's latest recommendation whatever gadget, though - he gets a little DEEPER/freakonomical AND even more interesting later in the excerpt, in considering why we listen to music in the context of/pulling together all the stuff from earlier in this post -
Most likely the music market is about more than simply buying "good music," as a critic might understand that term. People buy music to signal their hipness, to participate in current trends, or to distinguish themselves from previous generations. Buyers use music to signal their social standing, whether this consists of going to the opera or listening to heavy metal. Others value partaking in novelty per se. They find newness exciting, a way of following the course of fashion, and the music market offers one handy arena for this pursuit. For some people music is an excuse to go out and mix with others, a coordination point for dancing, staying up late, drinking, or a singles scene... For whatever reason, most consumers find it harder to reorient their attention towards older musics. Perhaps only new music allows for effective signaling and sorting. When music is new, individuals can show that they are connected to current modes of thinking and feeling. Not everyone can know “what is in,” because “what is in” is changing so frequently. That very fact makes it worthwhile for consumers to put effort into following the new. The music market might therefore churn product to help people communicate their identities to others, and to help people play an ongoing dynamic game of clues and cues. Furthermore previous generations already have claimed older musics, making them less well suited for social differentiation. Perhaps musical taste is a game of secession and repudiation more than anything else.Evaluating the efficiency consequences of illegal downloads is difficult for a more fundamental reason. Most generally, we do not understand the demand for music very well. We do not understand what most fans want from their music. Just as book buyers are not always readers, the music market is not always about the tunes. Sometimes it is about symbolic values...
CHEW ON THAT, feel it, reread it, digest, musical taste = a game of secession and repudiation, I like the sound of that. Read the whole thing, really, I could excerpt a lot more but this post is too long already -
Wait wait, actually - let's bring it back to Mr. Pareles to close it out with a pretty on point summary of why the majors are being straight up retarded here, in the context of all these freaky-nomics -
Copyright holders seem determined to shut down the buzz that builds stars. They want file-sharing technology to go away, refusing to recognize that the Internet itself could be defined as a file-sharing network. The Recording Industry of America has helped raid stores selling the mix tapes that build reputations in hip-hop, made from material supplied by the acts themselves. It sends cease-and-desist letters to fan blogs posting too many songs or lyrics and proselytizing for the music they love. Yet meanwhile, its member companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote a song into a radio hit or to make a video clip destined for MTV, where people can listen and watch free.Six years after Napster arrived, it should be clear that geeks and fans are simply going to bypass a legal framework that was built for sales of sheet music and discs. As they did with radio and television, copyright holders should make those volunteers their allies in marketing because, try as they may, they're never going to find the Off switch.