A Diatribe on File-Sharing
I'm a musician, so I've spent a lot of time considering and reading about the effect of File-sharing and DRM has had on the music industry. First of all, I think it's important to note that any way you want to shade it, downloading music online is theft. What it comes down to is the fact that you're getting music without paying for it like you would normally have to do. That said, I've definitely downloaded my share of music over the years. In fact, my love of music came about just as Napster was blowing up, allowing me to find music by favorite bands and allowing me to find new ones by not having to go through the radio, which I had long since dismissed, and MTV, which stopped focusing on music about 10 or 15 years ago, and in this way I credit Napster in no small degree with the love of music I have today. With all the advances in technology since then, it's just as easy to now download full records or even entire libraries of artists songs in hardly more time than it took to download a song back then. I've also spent my fair share of time with torrents, but I've realized that downloading music hurts musicians a considerable degree. For every person that downloads an album, thats an album that they're not getting paid for. When artists already get a preposterously low amount of money from record companies, it hurts their already strained pocket books. It also hurts their sales figures, which is still the yardstick in the industry when considering how much time and effort and money will be spent on the artists. So now, I try to only download releases from big name bands that already have a lot of money, or aren't around anymore.
But the real advantage to file sharing is that it turns an industry with a ridiculous price structure on it's ear. For every $10 CD sold in a store, the artist who created all that music gets 80 cents, while the record company gets 4 dollars (iTunes, while a step in the right direction, doesn't have much better of a price breakdown). This, to me, is utter madness. I think the single most important aspect of file sharing and the advancement of technology in the last 10 years is that it puts the means of distribution in the hands of the artists themselves. When a band can sell their CD's online to anyone around the world, it just cuts out the middleman. In this case, the middleman is the record companies who've grown fat and powerful off their massive profits, and the RIAA (which only represents the five biggest record companies, not independent labels) is fighting tooth and nail to keep their already laughably huge peice of the pie. Of course in doing this, they've launched a blanket of lawsuits against their consumers which is only suceeding in alienating them and driving them further away. Now, they're even lobbying the government to make sure they are able to lie about their indentity in the search for pirates.
File sharing definitely has its pros and cons, but I think it's most important aspect is (hopefully) the ushering in of a new era in music, where it's not controlled by five companies concerned only with profits. At a time when real musicians have long been struggling to be heard while celebrities get multi-million dollar recording contracts based on their popularity and sex appeal (paris hilton, ashley simpson, hillary duff, lindsey lohan, the pussycat dolls, the list goes on for days) when they have no musical talent, inclinations or ambitions, a change is in dire need.
When it comes to DRM, I remember reading Steve Jobs' open letter to the RIAA and applauding him for it. But I never saw the Doctorow article, and he makes some very good points about Apple's DRM benefits and history. I was happy to see that EMI agreed to offer its music on iTunes DRM free, and can only hope (though I won't hold my breath) that the other big-five record companies will follow suit. It's hard to argue with Jobs' point that putting strict DRM on online music while 90% of a catalog is available in stores DRM free is kind of goofy. It's just an issue of what constitues fair use, and of course, consumers have a much different perspective on it than the record company CEO's.
I, along with nearly everyone save the big record companies, welcome file-sharing with open arms. And for every time I read about some grandmother or college student getting sued for thousands of dollars for having (presumably) downloaded some songs, I take comfort in the fact that file sharing, in no uncertain terms, is destorying the music industry as we know it. And the longer they waste time on lawsuits rather than embracing file sharing and using it to their advantage, the more likely we are to see a new music industry, hopefully this time built around music, rather than the bloated corporations who make up the RIAA today.