yesterday Napster was ordered to shut down its operations...what do the
people on this list think about this?
personally I think its really sad...
About Napster itself, I cannot shed too many tears; compared with
those losing houses and lives in the Taiwanese flooding this week,
for example, the officers of another MP3 corporation seem not very
pitiful to me. And for me it is that word - Corporation - which
makes the Napster debate so troublesome and ultimately so illusory.
The news media, at least in US, broadcasting across channels owned by
the same international conglomerates in whose flabby folds the large
record companies also warm themselves, have seen fit to cast the
debate as a fight between Napster and Metallica, between Sili Valley
startup and rockstar establishment, between the fans and the band.
But I type this message in San Francisco, in which Metallica - whose
"And Justice for All" I must, as a former metalhead (and continuing
Judas Priest fan), admit to finding rather pleasurable - have been
quite flamboyant about the Pacific Heights mansions and designer
clothes signalling their success and in which the neighboring
mansions are likely being purchased by the more successful players in
the internet startup casino, and to me both "sides" of the debate as
it has been conveniently packaged are on the same side: Metallica is
a collection of people who have successfully wrung wealth from their
product, and Napster is another collection of people who would like
to do the same with their software. (If anyone doubts the latter
claim, note this statement from the Napster website: "Napster, Inc.
recently closed a $15 million Series C venture capital funding
round." That amount could likely fund all of the musicians and
labels on this list for next several decades!) There is, however, a
hidden Other Side of the debate, and one toward which Courtney Love,
of whom I cannot in general call myself a fan, points in her
surprising words in Salon: the "working" - or perhaps non-working -
musicians. In the Napster case, there are two possible outcomes:
(1) Napster wins and becomes a hugely successful internet startup,
with luxury mansions and Porsche Boxsters for each and all, or (2)
Metallica wins and gets even more money to expand its members'
mansions and repair their sportscars. But for me neither outcome has
any impact on working musicians, who remain scurrying about for
crumbs beneath the table as the corporate music entities continue
their tug-of-war for the large loaves. The real threat hidden
beneath the name Napster is of music recontextualized as freeware in
the decentralized realm of the internet rather than as payware in the
centralized production and distribution matrix of the Big Five global
entertainment leviathans. For rockstars at the level of Metallica,
profits are immense and when chased can indeed be transmuted into
cars and houses, but for the musicians at the other end of the
continuum - at the level, for example, of artist-run nanolabels and
undistributed private editions - the profits barely cover the costs
of physically producing and promoting a record, and this on a good
day and with honest and nonbankrupt distributors. But if the
record-object and the associated costs of its manufacture and
dissemination can be shed in favor of a directory of freeware (or
shareware) files posted on line and distributed by way of a
scattering of hyperlinks to and from like-minded musicians, the cost
of each record for the musician drops to the point at which little or
no profit is required to preserve the sustainability of the musically
generative activity. And while a large distributor will likely put a
nanolabel at the bottom of its list of priorities, giving it the
circulation of a seagul-beshat cinderblock, a decentralized network
of mutually-linked websites can give the same music encoded as MP3
data far wider circulation among those who might not have taken a
chance on a physical record or even have known of that record's
existence. Moreover, as a musician, a label, and a record geek I
would argue that anyone obsessive enough about music to dig down
toward the sendimental layers at which nanolabels and private issues
and CDR-handburns are buried is someone quite happy to buy a record
if it is there for the buying. I have sent cash to Norway and IPMOs
to Japan for obscure releases, and some items have lingered on my
list of Holy Grails for over a decade. The pleasure of a record is
not just in its sound but also in its package, its design, its paper,
the play of light across the grooves or the shine of the silkscreen,
and if such can be had I am happy to pay for it. MP3 files for the
musical sub-underground are not a way for fans to cheat musicians of
their miniscule revenues but rather a means for those unwilling to
spend their money or unfamiliar with a group or a style to hear music
otherwise unheard. So someone takes one of my records and makes it
available by way of Napster or one of its decentralized descendants -
what happens? Someone who has not purchased and has no intention of
purchasing my record hears it, perhaps even burns it onto CDRs for a
few friends, and eventually the music has found its way into new
ears, two of which may even have between them the mind of a record
geek, who will need the physical record enough to track it down and
pay for it. Meanwhile, I have lost nothing, and yet without
promotional tour jackets and lifesize pneumatic action figures and
mirror lines with radio reps the music has essentially found its own
way around in the world, perhaps even increasing the dreaded "moving
of units" in the process. Yet while the internet and the advent of a
compact and high-fidelity audio file format have offered a new
metaphor for the production and distribution of music, the record
companies (rendered irrelevant in the new scheme) and the rockstars
(fearing any alteration of the system feeding housing clothing them)
fight in court to force the old exploitive and hierarchical metaphor
down our throats for another desperate cycle. What the two parties
to the action fear most is that We on the Other Side will simply
ignore them, building a world in which monolithic and centrally
controlling musical business entities have no place. And so perhaps
we shall. But for the moment I will listen to this collection of
Simon & Garfunkel - having given my money to Sony for the CD - and
let those from Metallica and Napster smile and grimace with their
legal teams in their respective hot tubs.
--
NOTE NEW DOMAIN FOR E-MAIL & WEB:
joshua maremont / thermal - mailto:thermal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
boxman [hako otoko] label - http://www.boxmanstudies.com/