Silicon Insider: Music Downloads Won't Disappear
Sept. 11, 2003 -- — Give the record industry credit: It has shown far more creativity and imagination in screwing up this music download business than it has in the popular music it's produced over the last 10 years.
I mean, is it possible to blow a PR campaign worse than this?
It's been a long time since I was a corporate flak, but even I know that when you're searching for a good, high-profile case as an example to scare off everyone else you don't pick a 12-year-old honors student from the projects — Brianna LaHara of New York City — and you don't bust into her room while she's doing her homework.
"I am sorry for what I have done," Brianna said in a statement that showed absolutely no adult influence whatsoever, "I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love."
Sheesh. Why not shoot her too, and claim she was resisting arrest? Or maybe put handcuffs on her little wrists next to her charm bracelets? What genius thought of this? Yeah, this'll put the fear of God into every MP3-dealing junior high school cheerleader in America.
But that wasn't enough. Having made complete idiots out themselves, the powers that be at Recording Industry Assocation of America then tried to do damage control by announcing that it was "settling" the potential $90,000 fine with little Ms. LaHara for just $2,000. See, we're not as hard-hearted as we looked. Great, so now the message is: we crush children, but don't worry Mr. Professional Downloader, we're not really serious about all this. We're just bluffing. Meanwhile, the technology news Web site slashdot.org has started a fund to pay Brianna's "fine."
A Bankrupt Industry
That was Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, the RIAA had taken a new tack. "Look! Look!" It screamed, "There's child pornography available on the peer-to-peer download sites."
Yeah, no kidding. When you drive a billion-dollar industry underground, don't act surprised when it's suddenly populated by predators, perverts and all the other denizens of the demimonde. But what's most shocking about this latest announcement was that the record industry was able to make it with a straight face.
After all, this was just a week after the MTV Video Awards show, to which Snoop Dogg arrived accompanied by his favorite pimp and leading two women on leashes — and, of course, a dominatrix-dressed Madonna swapped spit on stage with a career-desperate Christina and Britney while her little girl looked on nearby.
If the recording industry is so concerned about bad influences on young people, why is 50 Cent at the top of the charts? And if it that upset about kiddie porn, why does R. Kelly have a recording contract at all?
No, what we've seen in the last couple weeks, on stage and in the courts, is the exposure of the current spiritual and creative (and perhaps soon, financial) bankruptcy of the pop music industry. Lately, it's been a tsunami of symbols and portents: besides the ones already noted, there was also the shut-out of Johnny Cash at the VMAs, the death of Warren Zevon, the simultaneous sellout and ascendancy of Beyonce … and, of course, Justin Timberlake.
As I've written in this column before, it's 1962 all over again. Movie stars have become rock stars, style matters more than content, and every song on the Top 30 has been designed by committee with help from the marketing department. It's choreography as music and the Disney Channel as distributor.
It Won’t Go Away
This industry cynicism extends to the products, the CDs, themselves. As the recent price cuts show, the record industry has been gouging the market for a long time — at least since the advent of the CD essentially killed the two-song, cheap 45.
And kids aren't stupid. They know they are getting ripped off both aesthetically and commercially. So, they've fought back with the one weapon they have in abundance: Easy familiarity with technology: Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus and all the other P-to-P sites, each one driven by mounting record industry litigation to become a little more amorphous, decentralized and intangible.
Are they illegal? Sure they are. But the sheer numbers of participants suggests that what we are seeing is an upwelling of mass desire (or mass frustration) by an entire generation. This is not a genie that can be put back into the bottle, even by arresting and intimidating 12-year-old girls. All that does is guarantee that the next generation of download technology will be even more sophisticated, more decentralized, and, thanks to cryptography, even more elusive. This time the RIAA could find the owners of the computers. Next time they will be invisible.
More than a year ago I suggested in this column that the music industry face the reality that its lucrative little con game was over, and begin figuring out how to co-opt the new world of Internet downloads — perhaps through multi-tiered pricing according to audio quality. Steve Jobs even showed them how to do it, for which Apple is being amply rewarded, with iMusic already reaching 10 million downloads.
But the music industry apparently refuses to abandon its old money-making machine, even if, as current sales figures show, that machine is beginning to smoke and leak oil. Instead, the industry has chosen to criminalize its more ardent customers. Very shrewd. And forward-looking.
It is, of course, a cliché to compare anything with Prohibition. Yet, there are two interesting lessons for this current situation to be learned from America's most famous attempt to criminalize American's mass participation in a low-grade misdemeanor.
The first is that once 10 million Americans do anything on a daily basis you aren't going to stop it. The second is that once you attempt to ruthlessly enforce such laws, you will only create martyrs and folk heroes while simultaneously driving the biggest players ever deeper underground into crime and civic corruption. We gave up on Prohibition 70 years ago, but we still have the Mob.
That child pornography is lurking around P-to-P sites is evidence that this process has already begun. Worse is coming. Meanwhile the RIAA is redoubling its efforts at enforcement, blind to the truth that it is already too much, too late.
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.