perfidy

Buckethead recently sent me a link to an interesting article in The Consumerist on how one regular innocent music fan found himself driven to desperate piracy by the perversity of the record industry.

In short, this music fan, who has given in his estimate about $20,000 to the various labels in revenues over the years, found himself stymied by the DRM on the most recent Luna album.

Last week while I was busy importing my CD's into iTunes so I could listen to them on my iPod (a most tedious task), I hopped on the internet. iTunes was busy importing a Luna CD, one of my favorite bands, so I decided to see what they were up to since they disbanded a few years back. After a few clicks in Google, I found a blog site describing a posthumous, internet-only release of a collection of covers the band had recorded throughout their career. While I already had many of the songs (they were often featured on b-sides and imported singles, etc.), I couldn't resist tracking down this compilation. As I read further on the blog site I encountered a link to a .zip file containing the entire collection ripped as 128kbps mp3's.

While I must admit being tempted to simply click away and download the collection, I though to myself, "Well, if I buy the music it's only $10, and this way I will get high quality .WAV files. Besides, it's not like Luna were getting rich off of their careers, they could use the money..."

So I headed to Rhino's online store, purchased the music, and downloaded the files.

A little later that evening, I tried to move the .WMA files into iTunes, when I received an error message telling me that iTunes could not import them because they were copy protected. I downloaded the files again (which took another 12 minutes) and again, the same message.

So I called Rhino customer support and after an 8 minute wait spoke with a representative. She informed me that the files were indeed copy protected so that I could only play them on specific music players, most notably not iTunes.

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I actually purchased them."

"Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to."

There's much more there, about how Rhino eventually advised him to keep trying illegal maneuvers until he found a way around their DRM to make the files work with iTunes.

Now, leaving aside the perversity on display here - do the right thing and get giant hassles in return - I am appalled that Rhino, of all labels, hasn't gotten their act together in the eight-odd years since Napster first came on the scene. Eight long years of missing opportunities, making mistakes, and alienating the same public that should be their partners in sharing awesome music together.
And yet, the song the labels sing now is exactly the one they sang when I left the music business four years ago: electronic files are murder; physical media is the past, present and future; consumers are licensees, not purchasers, of the music they consume; and what the hell is with this tech-mology stuff anyway? And that's a death warrant.

Some of you will remember a couple years ago that a Harvard Business School professor did a huge study of the effect on downloaded music on retail music sales (recently published in the Journal of Political Economy as "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." At the time, he found that the effect was exactly "none." Declines in music sales could be explained through other means, for example the proliferation of other forms of media entertainment competing with music for the public's attention and dollars, as well as the end of the long era in which record and tape owners were upgrading their old media catalogs to compact disc. Indeed, downloaders either tended to download music they'd not have bought anyway, or to treat downloading as a way to sample new music that they then might pay for. In fact, the evidence suggested that there was a significant 'long-tail' effect at work - the million-sellers lost some sales to downloading, but the download-assisted boost in sales of the other thousands of half-forgotten albums out there more than made up for the decline at the top.

Whether or not you agree that downloading in and of itself has a minimal net negative impact on record sales, the facts are that CD sales are down 20% from last year. It now takes far fewer sales to have a #1 hit than it did even three years ago. Right now, indie band The Arcade Fire have the number-two album in the country. What!?! They're fine. They're alright. But they're just The Arcade Fire, and their new album has gotten a lot of good press. Whoop-de-doo. Since they haven't shot platinum yet, I can only surmise that they the overall sales pool is indeed shrinking. Further evidence: abrasive 80s revivalists !!! (that's pronounced however you want - "bang bang bang" or "chick chick chick" are the ones I've heard) are also in the Billboard Top 200. Now, I've heard !!!'s new album, and yeah sure it's fine. But I'm a little bewildered as to why a band whose closest antecedents are cult heroes like Wire and Television and whose name isn't even pronounceable on the radio have a charting album.

I will probably get tired of saying this some day, but not yet: The idiots who run the music industry are slowly strangling their baby by steadfastly refusing to pursue creative ways to adapt to changing realities and partner with their audiences to create new means of selling and buying music. Instead, they are suing the dead and prepubescent children, lashing out at the exact same people they should be embracing, the exact same people who are the key to their future. (Except the dead guy, of course, but he did leave behind children who are currently being sued in his place.) They are even forcing out executives, like EMI's Ted Cohen, who have advocated forcefully and articulately for the industry to stop shitting where it eats its dinner.

For a while, I felt a little bad about all the old-school executives who knew music and only music, who I assumed were ignorant of computers and digital media and only needed some time to get used how things work today. Then, I thought, they'd turn it around and stop it with the lawsuits and the rootkits and the $18 compact discs and the single-vendor licensed media files. But I'm now convinced I was giving them far too much credit. No, those money-grubbing bastards deserve every ounce of pain and humilation that is undoubtedly coming to them.

[wik] Just a final observation. A computer recently came through the tech support shop where I work, that contained more than 12,000 files purchased from iTunes. Can you count with me the ways in which this person has used his money unwisely?