Pirates attack !
The internet is a powerful marketing tool used since its early days in order to promote artists. Now more than ever, music seems to be prevalent in our society of immediacy as attested by the growth of blogs, webradios and musical social networks. Notwithstanding, for some time, the web has been blamed for being responsible for a crisis within the entertainment industry, particularly in the music industry.
On Tuesday, September the fifteenth, French Deputies voted in favor of Hadopi 2, a law project which shows a profound lack of understanding of what the Internet actually is. The proposed measures and sanctions aim at eliminating illicit downloads considered as a serious threat for the music industry by the French Ministry of Culture. "There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone" according to President Nicolas Sarkozy, convinced that the web is nothing short than the potential killer of musical creation. Emphasizing threats from file sharing systems, the law project which is in line with what one calls the "graduated response" gives to a specific court the possibility to decide to cut the internet accesses that are known for being used to download data protected by copyright. With this project, the government, which only wants to protect the producers backs, contravenes to the presumption of innocence and gives the possibility to exclude someone from the information society.
The major music labels (Sony-BMG, Universal, Warner, EMI) dominate the music industry and they want to stop at all costs the ever-growing phenomenon of free sharing of music, claiming that its impact on their business has been devastating. I think that it is funny when we know that Sony is one of the most important producer of mp3 players, blank CDs and CD burner, isn’t it? Then, who are the ones to blame? If illegal downloads have such an impact on the CD sales, Sony has dug his own grave… They just refused to accept that the industry they work for is in a state of profound change. Instead of punishing the ones they call “thieves” or "pirates", the system itself has to evolve. If they really want to make money with music, the majors will have to offer satisfactory alternatives to illegal file sharing.
They can decide the cut of the web subscription to internet users known for downloading illegally but according to me, they won't be able to eliminate such a well-spread activity. One must move with the times, after all. With the advent of peer-to-peer which was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the act of downloading music became extremely frequent for millions of webnauts. Everybody has an mp3 player and file sharing and streaming providers offer immediately good quality music. It seems difficult to evaluate the specific impact of free sharing on the recording business. Though, Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Stumpf looked at a sample of albums sold in the US in the second half of 2002 and showed in the Journal of Political Economy that the effect of downloads on the sales was “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” There are less and less people ready to pay for albums they can get simply and freely thanks to the Internet. Why should we pay? To support the artist who gets at best $2 per album? It’s extremely hard for composers to earn a good living purely off their music. That’s not new. Recording labels always have promoted the most bankable artists and a very small number of the albums released are actually profitable.
That's a fact that Internet and the audio compression technologies such as mp3 music format deeply transformed the music industry. They have profoundly impacted the recording business. They have made information sharing much easier and the web is without a doubt the future of recorded music.
As a musician and a composer, I want my work to be easily available to most people and Internet seems to be an incredible opportunity for an artist to put himself on the map. Myspace, last.fm, Youtube, socials networks... The artists don’t need middlemen anymore. The Internet is going to change the way we consume music but it is not going to kill the entertainment industry. The producers want us to believe that music is dying with CD’s but the music isn’t actually limited to an object. The web will continue to increase variety and to lead to the appearance of more new artists, questioning a system when only four labels record, distribute, and promote the music.
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