Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The demographics of file-trading are boom and bust. Until it was shut down, Napster constituted nearly the entirety of the file-sharing market. "Then we saw a huge uptick in at least 10 other services, and there weren't as many consumers in any one of those services as there were in Napster," says Aram Sinnreich, an independent music industry analyst in Los Angeles. But some of those networks started getting more attention than others, and they came out ahead. "Morpheus and AudioGalaxy really became the leading inheritors of Napster's user base," Sinnreich says. Then the two services lost their footing. In February, Morpheus suffered a technical glitch that booted it off its network -- which it shared with users of KaZaA and Grokster -- and it was forced to switch to Gnutella. And AudioGalaxy began blocking more and more files until its RIAA-imposed crippling in May. Now it seems that KaZaA, a client called WinMX, and the various clients on the open-source Gnutella network handle the bulk of file sharing.
And they all have their problems. Salon spent several days trying to download all sorts of songs from these services. The main test was this: How much elbow grease would it take to get a recently released, barely known -- though not obscure -- album? The album that seemed to fit was "Come Away With Me," the debut release from the "pop jazz" singer Norah Jones. Jones, who's 22, has a voice that critics seem incapable of describing without using the word "sultry"; she's generally received the sort of critical acclaim that most young musicians would sell a kidney for. Some radio stations play Jones' music, though not the stations that play top tracks from Billboard Hot 100 -- precisely the situation that made her a good test subject.
File trading has long been justified on the grounds that it lets people listen to new music before purchasing. Whether people are actually more likely to buy the new music they like after they've downloaded it is a question that still hasn't been resolved (there are several conflicting studies) -- but it nevertheless stands to reason that for artists like Jones, artists whose "distribution channels" are limited, file trading might be more help than harm.
So which was the best trader? At various times all of them seemed, on average, to be worth what you pay for them -- which is near, but not exactly, nothing. You pay with your time, and you pay with your computer's processing power and your network's bandwidth, which some of the clients gobble up madly. (One popular Gnutella client, QTraxMax, seemed to stop all other local network traffic into my computer each time it did a search.) The process was fraught with the usual hassles of trading -- the songs are there but the downloads hang, terminate inexplicably or, if they come through, sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders.
"It's the black market," notes Sinnreich, "and the black market should feel like the black market. I don't think file sharing is decreasing, but there's never a lot of stability there. It's a world where every six months people have to choose new software."
For the brief period that AudioGalaxy was in its prime, its elegant Web-based system did away with these frustrations; maybe that's why it was killed. But still, in Salon's research -- even if it took a bit of time and a lot of micromanaging -- the Jones album was, in the end, ultimately available from every trading network.
And the numbers reflect that. According to Ipsos-Reid, an independent market research firm, there are many more people downloading MP3s today than there were when Napster was around. At the root of it, researchers say, is a consumer sense that there's nothing morally wrong with using the systems. Edison Media Research recently asked people what they thought of this statement: "You no longer have to buy CDs, as you can download the music for free from the Internet." Twenty-two percent of people between 12 and 44 agreed with it. When you just ask teenagers, says Jayne Charneski, an Edison vice president, the results are even more dismaying for the record industry. "Seventy-four percent said there's nothing wrong with downloading or burning music," she says. "Then when we put it in form of, 'Well, do you know musicians aren't being compensated?' that number comes down a little. They cared more for the musicians than the record labels, but only a little bit."
Asked whether such research indicates that RIAA's legal pursuit of file-trading services has been ineffective, Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman, said no. In an e-mail, he wrote: "We believe that our legal strategies are having success. We have never lost a case and two of the most popular, easy-to-use sites are either now offline or finally respecting intellectual property. The online shoplifting of music does continue to plague the industry, but our legal track record so far is clearly having an impact." Lamy agreed that many consumers don't think that music trading hurts anyone, and he said that the RIAA would do more to change that attitude. "It's more than just protecting our legal rights through the courts," he wrote. "It's also educating people about the reasons why unauthorized file sharing hurts the music they care about in the long run. That's a key component of any long-term effort to change people's behavior."
But if the industry tries to educate people, will they listen? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in addition to going after file-trading services, the RIAA is planning to take legal action against individual file traders. Like the news of the Berman bill, the report immediately caused a stir in file-trading circles, and the RIAA appeared to step back from the issue. (Lamy declined to comment on it.) But many people say that such proposals have created such a distaste for the music industry that it's going to take more than the hazy notion of "hurting music" to get them to change their attitudes toward file trading. "I don't think 10 years ago consumers thought much about record labels one way or the other," says Sinnreich. "These days you have a music-buying populace that is completely disenchanted by the people selling it to them. Is that a healthy business?"
The Berman bill won't help the industry win any more friends, either. Although Berman -- whose top benefactor is the entertainment industry, from which he received more than $180,000 for his 2002 reelection campaign -- suggests, in a statement, that his bill is "narrowly crafted, with strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner," critics say it's anything but. Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the way he reads the bill, victims of the industry's hacking "don't get to go to court unless the attorney general signs off on it. And you have to prove that they knowingly or intentionally crossed the line, which is exceedingly hard to prove."
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