Wednesday, September 10, 2003
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003 |
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The war for music By MICHAEL
BOYLAN I know there are too many wars going on right now War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, War in Iraq, War on Unemployment but there is another war looming and this one is big. It is the War for Music. How did it start? The recording industry says we started it by downloading music and robbing them of much needed finances. We, the citizens, say they started it when they sold CDs for far more than they were worth, therein damaging their industry and forcing people to find a better way. They retaliated by shutting down download sites and blocking songs and CDs, we answered with a class-action lawsuit arguing that the CD prices were intentionally too high. Now, they have struck back with lawsuits of their own, targeting downloaders as young as 12 years old and imposing fines that can run up to $150,000 a song. This means war. Sharing music has occurred since the dawn of time. O.K., maybe not that long, but minstrels probably did covers of other minstrel tunes during the Middle Ages. Do you think they threw down their lutes and demanded being paid the gold coins that the other minstrel received while singing the song? Maybe that's not a very good example. Let's flash-forward to the invention and widespread use of cassettes, where music sharing really started to grow. If you liked an album and had a cassette player on your stereo, you could record the album to tape. Later, you could record songs off the radio and soon after that you could record tape to tape. Thus, mix tapes were born. Now, it may not have occurred at the level that people are sharing music through computers, but it happened. Where was the outcry? There wasn't any. The numbers were still growing as technology expanded. In fact, people who had something on album, upgraded to eight track and then cassette and then CD. In some cases, people bought the same work at least four times. Now that the industry has slowed and sales have dropped from six billion to almost five billion, the recording industry is worried. Does it have something to do with downloading? Absolutely. Is that the only reason for the drop? No way. Until recently (and I have yet to see the drop yet) CD prices were outrageous and the music quality wasn't great. Why would someone pay almost $20 for a CD that is barely over an hour long? Even if the music is fantastic, it is hardly worth the price. For instance, the last two Weezer albums were each just over a half-hour long. Twenty dollars for 30 minutes? No way. The CD itself costs a little over a nickel and now that people have fast computers, many equipped with CD burners, this is common knowledge. Artists have a right to be paid, as do the people that work on the albums, but the money comes from touring, merchandise, and, don't let them fool you, sales. People like 50 Cent and Eminem are still setting sales records, so the industry can't be that sick. Anyway, how do we fight and ultimately win this war? First, we need to stop downloading songs for free and start sharing CDs legally. Organize parties where you get together with your neighbors and lend each other CDs for a week. There is nothing illegal about ripping songs off CDs and putting them on your hard drive. Yet. As long as you aren't on a download site, you can still do what you want with the CDs that you paid your hard earned money for. Secondly, we need a compromise of how to download music at the same clip that we are used to without paying through the nose for it. I think that 99 cents a song is too much, especially if you are not downloading new music. Perhaps a sliding scale of song worth would work. Lastly, those who do get sued by the recording industry need to fight and not settle out of court. Lawyers need to take the cases pro bono and show just how insane the industry is being. No song is worth $150,000 and I think that people can prove that they have been more than generous to the recording industry over the years.
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