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The music biz is declaring success, citing lawsuits and Apple's iTunes. But to music fans who recall the glory days of Napster, the fight goes on.
Jan 15, 2004 | If one is willing to believe the happy talk from music business executives, the tide has finally turned against file sharing, thanks to the get-tough tactics employed by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Last fall, the RIAA began filing lawsuits against individual users of peer-to-peer trading sites, and the strategy, the RIAA says now, has paid off. The group is careful not to declare a final victory over file trading, but things are finally beginning to look up for a business long in decline, say industry representatives. After years of scoffing at copyright laws, Americans are finally beginning to understand the gravity of file trading's offense against copyright.
"What the lawsuits have done is facilitate a national discussion," says Mitch Glazier, an RIAA lobbyist. "They have raised awareness and especially made parents talk to their kids about what they're doing online. Parents had no idea what Kazaa was, they had no idea whether their kids could or couldn't access it." The legal strategy, Glazier says, has "forced people to discuss what's appropriate."
Since September, the RIAA has sued 382 Americans for trading music online. The lawsuits -- which carry theoretical maximum fines of millions of dollars each -- brought the industry some ugly publicity, but by the perverse logic of the recording industry, suing customers has also been good for the bottom line. In 2003, overall CD sales were down 2 percent from the previous year. But in the fourth quarter -- after the suits were filed -- sales shot up almost 6 percent over the same period in 2002. Meanwhile, legitimate online digital music services enjoyed phenomenal success in 2003. Apple, which introduced its iTunes Music Store in March, has already sold 30 million songs from the 99-cents-a-track service, and dozens of other companies -- including the now-aboveboard Napster, RealNetworks, and even Wal-Mart -- have joined the fray.
Has the recording industry, so often criticized for its antiquated ways, actually won the digital music fight? Is the era of Napster -- the file-trading free-for-fall that we were once told would never go away -- truly over, destined to be replaced by the more sober ethos of iTunes?
It turns out that there are as many different answers to these questions as there are vested interests in the fight over the future of music. While the industry cites several third-party studies that suggest a plunge in trading activity as a result of its lawsuits, its opponents dispute those studies and point to other numbers that indicate an increase in song swapping since the lawsuits began. And while the industry points to iTunes sales statistics as a sign that music fans are willing to pay for songs online, critics of the record labels pooh-pooh the iTunes numbers, noting that they represent but a fraction of the total music business. Every party in the battle seems to have a different idea about who's winning and who's losing.
But if it's true that the recording industry has really won the war over digital music, the future, its critics say, looks very bleak. A victory for the RIAA will lead us to a world that looks very much like the status quo: The music firms want to sell CDs, file lawsuits against traders, and preserve today's copyright laws. Every legitimate music service looks like iTunes -- and while they are convenient and fun enough to use, they aren't nearly as radical as the old Napster was, and they promise far less freedom for music fans.
That's not the best outcome, say critics of the music industry. Despite the apparent success of iTunes, "The bottom line is, when Napster was around, people were all talking about music," says Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "People were more focused on music in that 12-month window than they've ever been since then." ITunes makes getting songs convenient, but it doesn't change the music industry, and it doesn't change music.
For longtime critics of the music industry like von Lohmann, the freewheeling Napster culture represents the zenith of the Internet age, and he's anxious to see that culture legitimized. "Why can't the American music fan get the same deal that radio stations have had for decades -- pay a reasonable blanket fee in exchange for playing what they want on whatever equipment works best for them?" von Lohmann asked in an e-mail. "Let a thousand file sharing applications bloom and let the fans post all their favorite songs. The more people share, the more money goes to copyright owners. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog."
When file-sharing advocates say that the recording industry can make more money by loosening its restrictions, their calculation might seem easy to dismiss as wishful thinking. But a close examination of the economics of file sharing indicates that, if the restrictions are loosened cleverly, this may very well be the case.
For the recording industry, the future of music is iTunes. For its opponents, though, the future of music is a return to the glory days of Napster. And the only way to make iTunes as good as Napster, they say, is to make it just like Napster.
