The music industry evokes the image of a boomerang passing gently through the pillars of a colonnade, always missing its target, but always returning to its odd circular path.
First, the industry decided to deny that in the coming digital age it would be even easier to copy music than home taping in the 1970s. After wasting years on anti-MP3 FUD, they finally drew iron on file sharers and tried to demonize them as a cross between hackers, criminals and freeloaders.
They missed the point in that they’ve given it to Americans for years with high prices and insubstantial content, so Americans have no “moral qualms” about stealing their material when it becomes convenient to do so. In fact, there’s no moral imperative anywhere here: if we all steal all music and movies, and the entertainment industry collapses, society will move on. Music and movies are not necessary for life.
So recently the superannuated hipsters of the music industry have been playing with their computers more, trying to figure out this online distribution thing, and they’ve made some positive steps. First they ditched the copy protection schemes that thwarted innocent users more than malicious ones, who can always output the raw signal and re-sample it as a worst case scenario. Now, they’re trying to make buddy deals with Apple and others to sell music on a subscription basis.
The idea behind this subscription stuff is borrowed from the Canadians, who realized they couldn’t catch all the file sharers, so instead it made sense to slap a five buck monthly surcharge on every ISP account to pay the record labels. The Americans, who are less than the Canadians worried about making everyone pay for everyone else, have improved the model. Those who want to participate in the cultural void of American pop music and movies can choose to buy a subscription on a monthly basis, or pay a higher price for an iPod with one attached, and then they can download the full catalog if they want.
When all the dust settles, we’ll see this for what it really is: radio over IP. We had radio for many years, but when CDs began to be sold used as well, people no longer had as much need for it. The publishing base expanded tenfold, and all these indie labels pitched their wares into the pile too, so people started reading up on what they wanted and using that as their buying guide. Now radio is returning over our new communications medium which conveniently appeared last decade. Ta-da!
My hope is that these free subscriptions will allow podcasting, and so return to us the last real advantage of radio, which is having informed DJs who can research their form of hip and bring it to us as a whole package for sampling. The listener buys what he or she hears that’s good, and the DJ gets to have fun making sonic sculptures out of different works.
It could be quite a positive turn to an otherwise fairly stupid procession of stumbles from a dying industry.