Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A little MP3 file-sharing program outlines the shape of things to come in the music industry -- and it's not what the big labels think.
Feb 4, 2000 | As I write this, someone I've never met who goes by the handle of "er7c" is downloading a couple of Aimee Mann songs from me, using a program called Napster that's running on both our computers. I had grabbed the MP3 song files from someone else last weekend; I wanted to check out Mann's "Magnolia" soundtrack, which I've since bought on CD.
Meanwhile, I am downloading "Long Tall Weekend," an entire MP3 album of songs by They Might Be Giants. I've actually copied many of the tracks from other Napster users and fallen in love with them already -- how can you resist a stentorian ode to "The Edison Museum" ("the tallest, widest and most famous haunted mansion in New Jersey ... the largest independently owned and operated mausoleum")? I decided to buy the whole package from EMusic.com -- it's one of the first MP3-only album-length releases. Once it's sitting on my hard drive, it will be available to er7c and a multitude of other Napster users.
By all the noise the music industry is making and the lawsuits it is filing, it is very afraid of people like me doing the things I've just described above -- and especially incensed at the providers of Napster, which made it absurdly easy for me to do them. Never mind that er7c, and I, and the hordes of college students and music fans who have embraced Napster also happen to be the music industry's best customers -- the people who buy tons of CDs every year. Never mind that the more music you have a chance to hear and enjoy, the more you're likely to buy. The music industry and its trade organizations, like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), are circling the wagons: Copying music files can be a copyright violation, and so they are turning the MP3 movement and innovators like Napster into the Enemy.
They're right to be afraid. As Janelle Brown's story yesterday reported, Napster's is a classic grass-roots-up tale: Invented by college students and embraced by hordes of dedicated users before it ever made a blip on a financial analyst's chart, it is only now being transformed into a more conventional Silicon Valley start-up business. Napster is the rare kind of software that opens a wide, clear window onto the future -- and the music corporations don't like what they see.
When Visicalc pioneered the spreadsheet in the early 1980s, you could look right through its rows, columns and cells and spy that decade's coming explosion of corporate downsizing and takeover wars. When the ur-browser Mosaic hit the technology industry's radar in 1994, its combination of alluring graphics and anyone-can-connect information-sharing pointed obviously and inexorably toward the vast bazaar of e-commerce and communication that we know as today's Web. Napster, which makes it simple to find and trade MP3 music files with other fans, offers a similar vista: Look into its upload and download windows and you can see a whole new order of music distribution coalescing at supersonic speed.
Most coverage of the MP3 story has focused on the legalities: Did I have any right to download those Aimee Mann files? Did the person I copied them from have the right to share them with me? Should I be worried that I in turn might have violated the law by letting er7c copy them? But the law is lagging behind reality. If these activities are illegal, violations are so widespread that enforcement becomes almost impossible -- as with the 55-mph speed limit, or the copyright laws surrounding home audio- and videotaping, or the copying and e-mailing of the full text of theoretically copyright-protected Web articles like this column.
Who is the music industry going to sue? When it gets mad at companies that provide warehouse-like servers, like MP3.com, it can sue (and has) -- and if it wins, it can shut those servers down. The brilliance of Napster is that, like the Internet itself, it lacks any center: It's just you, me and er7c, acting as individuals, sending files across the Net. The RIAA could try to shut down the central Napster directory, which lets users locate other users and their files; you can bet, though, that sooner or later someone would then come up with a more legally bulletproof version of the same service. And if the RIAA goes after the entire Napster user base, the music industry will find itself in the awkward position of suing a whole lot of its best customers. Which doesn't sound like smart business.
Get Salon in your mailbox!