http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/12/18/dont_steal_music/print.html
Don't steal music, pretty please
Record companies will make big, big money online. They just need to learn
to let go.
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By Paul Boutin
Dec. 18, 2001 | I knew the fight between the record industry and Internet
users was going to work out OK as soon as I saw the print ads for Apple's
iPod MP3 player. Nested at the bottom of the page is a comical
disclaimer: "Don't steal music." Ha ha! With its thousand-song
capacity and easy-to-use interface, everyone knows iPod is a great
incentive to go out and steal more music to fill it with.
Think back to three years ago, when the first portable MP3 player
debuted. The Recording Industry Association of America sued Diamond
Multimedia to halt shipment of its cute little Rio, which held only an
hour's worth of music. This time, the major labels are willing to let
Apple sell a portable player for pirated tunes (100 CDs' worth of them at
a time!) in exchange for a laughable admonishment to its customers: Don't
steal music, kids.
If this seems inconsistent coming from the same industry whose lobbyists
brought us the DMCA and are now pushing the SSSCA bill that would require
all consumer electronics in the U.S. to come with anti-piracy technology
built in, it's because the record companies are pursuing two goals at
once. Long term, they need to come up with a way to sell music online
that consumers will buy into. In the meantime, they are desperate to keep
the entire store from being pilfered.
Jim Griffin, the Cherry Lane Digital CEO who handles rights management
for songwriters and movie studios, says the shouting about pirates and
anti-theft devices is a deliberate short-term distraction, meant to keep
the rest of us occupied until the big players can agree on a cash-flow
model for downloadable entertainment. "There may be a division of
Sony building encrypted players in all earnestness," he says,
"but there's no way the heads of the company believe that's their
long-term strategy. So much of this DRM [digital rights management] stuff
is just sending husbands out to boil water while the wives have the
baby."
We got a first peek at the baby last week: A little-noticed announcement
by America Online was, in truth, the moment we've all been waiting for.
AOL has debuted its fledgling music subscription service, MusicNet, for
$9.95 a month -- less than the price of even one CD. AOL execs downplayed
the launch as a beta test, but coming from the unquestioned leader in
online access, a company known for the Mom-and-Pop friendliness of its
software, it's unmistakably the beginning of the end for the war between
the music industry and the Net.
Only the beginning, though. MusicNet suffers from the same sort of
restrictions and hurdles that sent people running to Napster in the first
place. There's a monthly limit on downloads, and there are technical
restrictions to keep customers from burning everything they can get their
hands on to CD. And MusicNet only offers music from three of the big five
labels -- Warner, Universal, Sony, BMG and EMI -- with no independent
releases.
To really succeed, AOL's music service needs to be as good as the free
and easy alternatives. Pricing needs to be an all-you-can-eat bundle
rather than a complicated set of restrictions that thwart customers at
the moment of fulfillment. AOL should know: The company pioneered
flat-rate ISP billing in 1997 and made it an industry standard despite
the initial pains caused by a rush of customers who simply left their
modems dialed in. Music should be offered the same way: Once you've paid
to get in the door, listen to as much as you want.
Likewise, the industry needs to let go of attempts to impose Byzantine
copy-protection schemes on consumers, as suggested by the SSSCA bill
being drafted by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C. Remember the complicated
copy-protection schemes on software floppies? We can only imagine the
number of profit-killing phone calls to customer support: "It won't
play." My own attempts to use MusicNet's beta were frustrating,
clearly because of code designed to stop me from playing music not
covered by the terms of my subscription, a technical feat much harder to
pull off than just letting me go ahead.
Indeed, the pointless attempt to control copyrighted data every step of
the way from musician's voice to listener's ear is the biggest roadblock
to success for online music. Just as HBO doesn't try to stop you from
taping its movies, so music sellers need to let go and trust their
customers. Remove the incentives for people to steal, rather than
imposing more technology that treats customers as would-be shoplifters.
Even former BMG head Strauss Zelnick, who says he has no problem throwing
big-time bootleggers in jail, agrees the industry's challenge is to come
up with an attractive alternative to Aimster and its ilk. "We need
to give consumers a service they want, at a price they're willing to
pay," he told me in an interview this summer. "People don't
like to think of themselves as criminals." But ironically, the more
anti-theft hurdles crammed into the legal products, the more attractive
the pirate alternatives become.
Surely they know that by now. Given the ample evidence from researchers
like Edward Felten that there's no technological way to stop bootlegging,
it's hard to believe the heavy-handed application of the DMCA and lawsuit
threats is anything other than a stall for time -- sending husbands to
boil water -- until the stakeholders can agree on how to tap and share
the lucrative Internet music channel.
A monthly subscription shouldn't require the customer to stop and wonder
every time she wants to play a tune: Do I have my license key? Which
players will this work on? Which record label is the singer on and what
subscription services carry that one? Why won't it play? Ugh. The threat
of ubiquitous digital licensing, copy protection and monitoring isn't
that Big Brother will know what you're listening to; it's that you'll
give up trying to listen to it.
There's no business need to monitor every song every surfer on the Net is
listening to, anyway. Griffin points out that radio airplay royalties
have long been based on samples taken from station logs -- actuarial
fees, rather than actual fees. "Radio stations have the option to
pay exactly per song played," he says, "but not many of them
use it. After 15 years, we've learned there isn't much difference between
the sampled numbers and the individually counted numbers."
Even my local coffeehouse pays an insurance-like annual fee to ASCAP, the
songwriters' agency, to cover the likelihood that one of its open-mike
night troubadours will do a Pete Seeger tune and incur royalty fees for
the house. And whenever I buy a new blank cassette to record phone
interviews, I pay a few extra cents that goes to the major labels in case
I use it to bootleg one of their recordings. Why can't my ISP just add on
such a tax, send it to the major labels and let me download anything I
want, any way I want? There's no one pricing scheme that will make
everyone happy, but bundled payment options are a lot more attractive
than trying to stop people from doing what they will.
It may happen. "Don't Steal Music," rather than the complicated
copy-protection system Apple could have jiggered into the iPod, gives me
hope the music industry is finally figuring out its place in a world
being remade by the Internet and a global economy. As a longtime musician
and sometime D.J. myself, I've seen firsthand that the big five are in it
not to make music, but to make money. But the industry's annual revenue
of $15 billion is, on a global scale, peanuts -- Web hosting alone pulls
in more than three times that much. Already, the big five record
companies are losing their grip as evil Masters of the Universe, becoming
instead the mere henchmen of new broadband empires. Warner is part of
AOL, Universal is merged with Vivendi, and Sony makes far more from
Playstation than from Michael Jackson. In the 21st century, record execs
are finding themselves on the other side of the negotiating table: Yes
sir, Mr. Case.
In that light, Bertelsmann's partnership with Napster was a smart move to
secure a future for itself. Napster had reenergized millions of music
fans, who held its brand dearer than any record label. But that
excitement is fading with every day we wait for the people who own the
music to let go enough to make buying their wares easier than bootlegging
them. Instead of telling us not to steal, how about just giving us a way
to pay?
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"RazorPop, Marc Freedman" <marc@...>
fvision
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