Napster: The Evolution of Music
May 23 '00
I regard the recording industry about as highly as those check cashing places around the corner from the pull tab bar and the plasma bank. How many times have you heard a great song on the radio or, yech, MTV and then bought that CD based on the killer song that you heard. If you're lucky that CD has the same version that you heard, then again you can hit snake eyes on it. How many times have you bought that CD and gotten a completely different version of that song that you like, and twelve other tracks that completely blow. Doesn't it feel good to shell out sixteen bucks for music that you don't like.
You can blame the musicians for the lackluster albums but it's the record companies that hold the ultimate responsibility for them. Furthermore it's the record companies that are making the most money off of them. The talent usually gets less than a dollar for the sale of each album. The actual cost of physically burning the CD is also less than a dollar. Even if the retailer marks up a CD 100% and sells it at $16.00 the record company is making six bucks off that sale. Those six bucks cover the actual cost to produce the album, distribute it, and the rest goes to the parasites that make up their executive ranks. Those same bloodsuckers are the ones who are responsible for bad albums. It isn't a musician's fault for not being talented enough to fill an album with good music. It's the record company's doing when they fill a CD with filler. They know exactly what they're doing when they do it. They know that people are going to hear that one good song and buy the album, they don't care that the consumers aren't going to be happy with that album, they don't even care if the consumer won't buy another album by that artist, why? Because they know that consumers will buy more albums from their labels. This went on for the history of recorded music. Music piracy was never really a threat because pirates couldn't replicate the quality of recording that came out of their studios.
Circa 1985 Enter digital music. CD's are a binary medium, that is the music is stored as a series of 1's and 0's. The quality of sound that can be replicated in this way is only limited by the quality of recording equipment and physical space to store this data. Each 1 or 0 is called a bit, eight bits make a byte, there are 1048576 bytes in a megabyte(MB), there are approximately 640 MB on a conventional CD. Considering that there are 15 songs on a CD each song on average can be 42MB.
At the time when CD's were introduced the price for a magnetic storage device that could hold 42+ MB was over $1000. The price for storing a CD was considered prohibitive by the record companies. Still today, 42MB is too large to practically store on a hard drive. The alternative to magnetic storage was to burn your own CD's, once again, the price of a CD burner was too expensive and often unavailable to consumers.
The cost of piracy was enough for the recording studios to embrace CD's as the medium of choice for distributing music.
Circa 1997 Enter the digital revolution. There are a number of technologies that have allowed people to make their own copies of music and share them with friends. The first advance is the evolution of personal computers. When CD's were first gathering steam, personal computers were comparably slow and limited in storage and usability. Today, just about everyone can afford a computer that is capable of recording and playing CD quality music. The second advance is the MPEG 3 compression algorithm that is commonly referred to as MP3's. MP3 encoding allows one of those 42 MB CD quality songs to be stored in 5 MB or less.
The third advance is relatively high bandwidth access to the Internet. Today with a cable modem or DSL connection it is possible to download a song in a matter of seconds.
Circa 1999 Enter Napster. Before Napster, MP3s were distributed via downloads from web pages and through e mail. E mail is impractical for wide distribution. Web pages are prone to cease and desist orders, of course unless the web page is registered in a country that does not recognize American laws, say China.
Napster, God bless it, is a utility that allows users to share their MP3s with others. Napster, inc., does not claim responsibility for the music that is distributed with its utility, just as say a gun maker claims no responsibility for the victim of someone who is shot by one of their weapons.
Enter Ethics. Consumers and Record companies both have legitimate beefs. As a consumer I'm still angry for the money that I've wasted on bad albums that were sold to me under misleading marketing. Their only protection from music piracy has been the limited technology available to the general American public. For the most part the entertainment industry has tried it's hardest to keep technology out of the public's hands. What kind of solution is that, repressing the technology that is available to people only because it enables them to get for free what they've been overcharging since the invention of recordable media.
There is a technological solution to piracy, it's what every intelligent person who has wanted to keep data controlled. Encryption, duh. DVD's were a step in the right direction. Of course the boys in the entertainment industry screwed that up, how? They made the encryption scheme used extremely weak. The blame for weak encryption algorithms is entirely on the entertainment industry. If they had been smart they wouldn't have relied on the repression of technology for the protection of their data. The record companies are growing more aware of their obselescence and they are taking legal action to preserve their existence. This is the crossroad that they face. If they should win and the technology is repressed by cease and desist orders will that be a better resolution. NO!!! The music industry is about to go on a diet that will rid it of the parasites that inflate the cost of music and soon musicians will make more from their music and consumers will pay less.
Enter tomorrow. The future is looking good.
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SlickFish
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