sam rosenthal, of projekt records, is back on his piracy soapbox again. he is asking each and every one of you to do your part to help stop piracy. he breaks the world down into two camps: camp a says: “Music should be free, fuck you for thinking I should pay for your music.” camp a is apparently the belligerent asshole camp. camp b says: “I want to support the music I love, because I want you to keep making it.” camp b is apparently the wishful thinking camp.
once again, sam is hurting the debate by oversimplifying the issue. i refuse to believe that there are only two types of music listeners in the world — those that say “fuck you music should be free” and those that say “please let me give you more money so you can play for me.” it would be awesome if the world was so binary — it would make the debate much easier to handle and deal with. it would make the bad guys bad and the good guys good. unfortunately, there really is no such thing as a black and white issue.
but, i’m not even going to necessarily get into that, because the truth is — regardless of whether the world fits into neat categories like sam suggests or not — he has a point: musicians need to get paid. if they don’t, they will stop making music. and that does nothing to fight the crappy state of popular music, where our choices are spoon-fed to us, and it’s increasingly difficult to find music outside the box of corporate sponsorship. a system needs to be devised where the people who want the music can get it, and the people who make the music get paid. back in the days of linear distribution and supply chains, that was easy: you make a record, you press it to vinyl, it gets sent to a distributor, who feeds it to record stores, where people buy it. even when recordable cassettes came along, the supply chain remained more or less intact. all that changes when the music is converted from atoms to bits; bits that can be duplicated onto your ipod, your friends’ ipod, your friends’ roommate’s ipod, your friends’ roommates’ ex-girlfriend’s laptop, etc, etc, etc.
sam describes three ways that music is traded illegally:
- russian mp3 stores that give the illusion of being legit because the have a real checkout process,
- bit torrent sites, and
- rapidshare, megaupload, and similar third-party file sharing/hosting sites.
sam says he can’t do anything about the russian sites, and they go largely unnoticed (or out of the jurisdiction) of organizations like the riaa. he, likewise, considers torrent sites a lost cause for pulling down illegal content (more on this in a sec). so, the solution to fighting online music piracy is: issue dmca complains against any and every rapidshare/megauploaded file you can.
wait. what?
first of all, i disagree that torrent sites are entirely a lost cause. i’d be willing to bet that the majority of music files traded illicitly on the internet happens across torrent networks. back in the good old days, if The Pirate Bay got a takedown request, they’d laugh in your face. but The Pirate Bay is no more, and whether they like it or not, their departure sets a major precedent in what can and can’t fly in today’s file-sharing. the new heir to the throne as the most popular/widely used torrent site is isoHunt, which isn’t a torrent site, per se: it’s a search engine, pulling results from a variety of different source torrent sites. as such, different rules apply. but what’s also different about isoHunt is that they actually respond to takedown notices if a copyright owner issues them. therefore, it’s not fair to say that there’s no chance of getting infringing material pulled off of torrent sites. sure, getting the results removed from isoHunt is different than getting the files removed from their hosting torrent sharing networks, but if isoHunt has the most traffic of any single bit torrent site since The Pirate Bay, pulling it down from there would go pretty far.
even that, though, barely addresses the issue. issuing dmca complaints (or bribing your minions to issue dmca complaints for you) is a band-aid solution to the problem. it’s a feeble attempt to staunch the bleeding. and it’s the same approach the major labels have been taking since the beginning of napster, and they are still no closer to “fixing” the problem than they were then — on the contrary, file sharing has proliferated. it’s not an insane notion to consider that the kids entering college next year might not even realize or think about the fact that what they are doing is in the least bit wrong — it’s just what’s done, it’s how music is acquired. whether or not that’s a “fuck you for telling me i need to pay for it”, the real challenge is to persuade those listeners to pay for what they’ve downloaded — or find some other gateway to a purchase — rather than alienating them more by saying “what you are doing is wrong.” reprimanding your audience is not the way to get more sales.
maybe sam is right. maybe putting your music out there for free and asking your audience to kindly pay if they feel like it really only works for established acts like nine inch nails and radiohead. but that doesn’t mean it’s an entirely wrong approach. the fact remains — and it always will be the same — that the music is there if you want to get it bad enough; pulling down one illegal copy of 10 neurotics will only prompt two or three more to show up in its place. i still maintain that the music industry needs to take a freemium approach to selling music — give away a limited or restricted version of your product for free (say, the full album in 128kbps mp3 files), and grant access to premium content for purchasers or subscribers. i may not be chris anderson, but i know that his own experiment in freemium still managed to get him a national bestseller. and despite the fact that the copyright laws in canada are more lax when it comes to file sharing, their digital music sales are actually increasing, rather than decreasing like everywhere else.
now i know sam is going to lambast me for expressing my opinion on my personal blog, in a forgotten corner of the internet that no one will read anyway, rather than on his facebook page where i can get flamed by project artists and die hards appropriately. and that’s just the thing — people aren’t likely to do what you want them to do just because you want them to do it. and just because you said “pretty please don’t steal my shit — if you really loved me you wouldn’t steal my shit” doesn’t necessarily make anyone less inclined to steal your shit if that’s what they are going to do. pulling your shit down so they can’t steal it won’t even stop them from stealing it, if they are determined enough. so attacking piracy one file at a time is kind of like trying to put out a raging fire with squirt guns. i guess if it helps you sleep better at night to know that people are out there trying to pull your stuff off of those two sites, well, good for you. but it’s not going to fix anything, and it’s certainly not any form of fight against piracy.
the truth is that the days of the record label are, largely, coming to an end, as more and more independent musicians are able to market and distribute their music themselves and make more profit from it. eventually, if you aren’t making a pop40 record, you won’t have any need for a label — if you even need one now. and maybe that’s why sam’s approach to music piracy so closely resembles that of the major labels — attacking the symptom rather than the problem. i hope sam’s scrappy little independent darkwave label in new york — and every other indie label/distributor out there (kill rock stars, sub pop, metropolis, fat possum, etc, etc, etc) — makes it through these growing pains as we move from the dark ages of music production to a full-fledged renaissance, with or without indie or major label help. i really do. but i think it’s a good thing that projekt.com isn’t just a record label, but also acts as a distributor and online music store providing access to some really awesome, obscure music. because, as i see it, labels and distributors will eventually become the same thing as many artists choose to sell their record themselves on itunes or bandcamp, and promote it on twitter, myspace, and facebook.
don’t get me wrong, i’m not heralding the death of the indie label — i think that indie labels will become like artisan food makers: sure you can get the same basic food elements at a fraction of the cost at any old supermarket, but the specialty stuff, the limited run, handmade stuff is so much better. it’s worth it to take the time to track down the obscure stuff, the local producers. and an essential part of specialty, artisan foods? free samples. hell, even the traditional drug pusher knows that the first taste is free — if you can get them hooked on the first freebie, they’ll be coming back for a long time to come.
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