The Day They Started Charging for Music
Article by Dustin van Schouwen
Once upon a time, there was this magical era where people just sometimes had instruments, and would play them for their friends and family because there were very few centralized means to hear music through. Despite the fact that Plato and Aristotle had already gotten into plenty of theory about (what's now) modern modal music, including what we now call the major and minor scales, these ideas were very slow to gain widespread acceptance. It was only during the last years of the Middle Ages that the use of polyphonic melodies again became popular - only a small amount of music remained from the Classical ages, most of it Greek music. On the other hand, there was music passed down by oral tradition - a commodity, in today's terms, out of the hands of any businessmen. It was only when music began to attain widespread popularity that people began to see it as anything like a source of profit. Concert halls would pack for the most popular of musicians, not to mention the money from drinks, and sheet music was an even more valuable commodity, to what point that the current notation was capable of describing music. Still, most of the world was still, by all considerable means, out of the reach of European powers, and outside of musicians who were somehow patronized by the state or other substantive economic bodies, oral music was the only source of entertainment for most of the world. Then something changed.
The Industrial Revolution was the start of it. The printing press introduced the possibility of mass reproduction of sheet music, information about composers, information about theory - all of it. There's the interesting thing about ideas - once technology itself has attained somewhat of a critical mass, its own continuous acceleration is guaranteed. The printing press hinted at the sort of distribution that the telegram, and then the telephone, radio and television would allow for. By 1900, we had already developed wax cylinders onto which music could be recorded and replayed with considerable fidelity.
As always, there was an idea that could be capitalized upon. There was a definite market for the distribution of music - to have a representation of a popular musician in your own living room must have seemed like the most ludicrous idea to the first that heard it. Like all 'modern' technologies, it began as something only affordable to the rich. A luxury, if you will. So it quickly becomes something that the more impoverished portion of the market is craving - its value lies not in what it represents, per se, but its perceived unavailability. Like any commodity, however: once significant demand is received, an industry balloons.
What is essential for this behavior for to be possible is a centralized scheme for the distribution of music. The telephone lines created one-to-one links between households, but there remained a central command center, an early server, you could say, to handle the connections. A select number of businessmen have the only access to the means of mass reproduction, as some record companies, through whatever deterrence of competition you want to describe, rose to the top and gained vast control over the industry. So now, we have a group of companies with the means for the distribution of music, who essentially have the collective ability to decide what music is popular, what music is under demand, and what music is sold. A very unfortunate thing happens: we have musicians like Britney Spears, all over the headlines. I cannot recall the point in my life at which I first learned of Britney Spears - since what must have been middle school, she has polluted the news, the tabloids, the public consciousness. It's not that she's a huge detriment or anything (that's up for debate), just frightening to think about.
Something even more fascinating has happened, however, that threatens to end this scheme. A scientist named Vannevar Bush, a man implicit in the development of the Manhattan Project, and the entire military/industrial complex generated during World War II in the United States, described an idea he dubbed the Memex - essentially the first decentralized network for communication. Paul Baran also described an idea named "packet switching," in which isolated blocks of data are transmitted electronically from one point to another - an idea which allowed for the development of early networks such as ARPAnet, while a renegade scientist named John C. Lilly theorized as to the immersion of consciousness itself in a global network, believing, after extensive use of entheogens and extreme sensory deprivation, that there was a mode of communication, which he dubbed "Earth Coincidence Control Office," that allowed this to occur, also allowing him to interact with dolphins. This seems like an extraordinary idea, but (bear with me) it may not be for long.
Xanadu was arguably the first solid theoretical precursor to the internet, developed by a student of both Bush and Lilly's, a man named Ted Nelson. What emerged from his ideas was a concept named 'hypertext', which allowed for the linked description of other pages. ARPAnet was next, a national network developed by the United States military for rapid electronic communication - the first spam, in fact, was sent out over it (demanding a stern lecture from a military general and a warning that the network should never again be used to send messages to multiple destinations). Eventually the National Center for Supercomputing Applications developed something called Mosaic, the golden stake in the railroad that allowed the internet to ignite, later turning into Netscape Navigator, which was quickly thrust into fierce competition with Microsoft's flagship Internet Explorer. In its first beginnings, these new technologies slowly created a fierce opposition from the so-called 'content' industry - first Usenet allowed the almost completely decentralized discussion and distribution of music, then the Motion Pictures Standards Group developed a technology that would revolutionize the storage of distribution of music - a lossy audio format that allowed songs to be stored, with well-comparable fidelity, at roughly 1/10 the size they would be on a compact disc. A student at Northwestern University, Shawn Fanning, developed the Napster technology, a simple service that allowed for the distribution of a number of songs.
This is when it got really bad.
The recording industry itself was outraged, and individual artists were quick to jump to their support, in spite of the fact that at this point, artists were lucky to receive a tenth of CD sales. Famously, Metallica's Lars Ulrich publicly sued Napster to seek lost profits, banning hundreds of users who had innocently downloaded even a single Metallica song. People were pissed. Maybe some of you remember the Napster Bad! video, which seemed to capture a lot of the sentiment regarding the lawsuit - a handful of greedy musicians exploiting laws developed in order to directly support the 'content industry' over the last hundred years to actually sue their fans. Nothing like this had ever occurred before. It was only a spectre, though, of the future that awaited the online file-sharing communities scattered around every city of the world. Companies like MediaSentry, little more than agents of media conglomerates like the MPAA and RIAA, have arisen to collect off of threatening and ruining downloads for unsuspecting internet users. We musn't forget that each individual 'sharing' of a song is little more than the creation of a copy of the song for a friend - in no way is the original copy invalidated, but most importantly, in no way does the individual profit off of this. Despite the fact that laws existed already to protect home reproduction of music, their terminology and their description of the current technology became outdated quickly. These laws were designed by aging politicians, many of them with no experience whatsoever with these newer technologies - Presidential candidate John McCain himself tries to send "internets" to his staff.
What the laws, and the content industry, essentially fail to recognize (or do, in fact, recognize, while acknowledging that there's still some money to bleed out of 'content'), is that technology is out-pacing them. They attempt to compromise, by investing in companies that offer to try to make money off of the internet's models for file sharing by selling the same content that's already freely available for download, sometimes even before the album's release. We already have means for instant communication and the transmission of vast amounts of data, but what's to prevent the further advancement of technology? Text, audio, and even video can be broadcast streaming across the internet, so there remains little possibility for it to stop here - our minds, the motions our brains attempt, all of it can be described over the internet - we may soon find we have video games that immerse our consciousness directly into the internet, echoing Lilly's ideas. Through the development of this as some sort of art of its own, technology may provide us with an entire world of our creation to explore. These conglomerates, however, historically have done nothing but try to prevent the new advancement of technologies that they perceived as a threat to their profits - videotapes were a famous example, as some of you may remember the bitter fight that occurred over them.
The legal arguments for the RIAA, the MPAA and other media conglomerates are already stretched thin - see what you can find about the "making available" argument to see what I mean. The attempts to win over public sentiment to support their cause flies in the face of the obvious fact that music is now available for free.
In my personal experience, I've never even thought to sell music - I've given away nearly every song I've ever written - having learned to use computers so early in my life, and having Napster at my fingertips, having warez sites, DivX movies, NES, Genesis, SNES, PC, Dreamcast and then XBOX games available for download, almost without exception within a few hours, has taught me that, without exception, it is patently absurd to attempt to charge for any type of information, especially when all of the money you spend on that information goes to support the efforts of companies who so often seem to exist for little purpose but to restrict your access to that very information.
To echo a quote given from a professor of a character in a movie produced by the same moguls who would try to stop us from downloading the movie itself, "human knowledge belongs to the world." I say this without a shred of doubt in my mind: there is no possibility, none, that the vast majority of people reading this article will have to pay for any type of media for their entire life. What we are witnessing is the greatest expansion of communication that the world has ever seen - as the technologies that create are themselves described over these networks, we will witness a distinct change in nearly every way the world functions. It is simply ridiculous to think that you can capture a sound from the air and charge for it.
To send a link to this article to a friend, you have to reimburse me the cost of having skilled Indonesian prostitutes, under the supervision of none other than Zombie Andy Warhol, engrave the article as a tattoo on the finest of South African goats, and then have them flown around the world 16 times, in first class, rerouting several aircraft carriers to refuel it (since it only flies over the ocean).