Why the music industry will lose in its fight against content sharing

by JONATHAN VALLELY for Urbane Magazine

The music industry has been fighting the sharing of content on the internet since the creation of file transfer networks.  In the latest skirmish, Google deleted several popular music blogs due to their participation in pirating music.  Find out why the music industry is doomed to fail in their fight.

Two teens share music in Rome, Photo by Ed Yourdon CC3.0

On February 10th 2010, Google deleted a half-dozen popular music blogs from its blogging service in response to their distribution of allegedly pirated music. The hysteria that followed, dubbed “Musicblogocide 2010,” was widespread and caused more than a few Blogger users to question the legality of the content on their sites- myself included.

A friend and I started our own music blog (http://shhhpeaceful.blogspot.com) in October, which we use to share full albums, ripped personally from CD and vinyl collections in high quality audio. Our site follows a template popular among music bloggers and is one you may have stumbled across before- each post offers a free digital download of a full album, hosted on a third-party “storage locker” service such as Rapidshare, complete with a tracklist, album art, personnel listings in the case of jazz recordings, and always with a paragraph or so of commentary about the music. We only once received a warning of having infringed copyright as outlined in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and promptly removed the offending post. However, February’s direct punitive action of the hosting service was as frightening as any of the milieu of scare tactics employed by the corporate music establishment to discourage music piracy and distribution. Past efforts include hefty fines or lobbying behind the establishment of invasive and illogical legislation. We decided that as long-time users of the digital download and as champions of this specialized distribution infrastructure, which has formed collaboratively, it behooved us to become actively involved.
The music blog, a peculiar medium, is the product of evolution. As Canada’s most famous media theorist, U of T’s own Marshall McLuhan, put it: the content of any new medium is another medium and, when you get down to it, is the message itself. The blog serves as the vessel for files, which contain bits of information, which in turn comprise a base for more abstract concepts- the ideas, emotions, and motivations that produce the lyrics and instrumentation. The jump from the analog media of tapes and vinyl to the digitized media of CDs and mp3 files has altered the manner in which we interact with, as well as the structure of the material and conceptual systems that constitutes a song. This transformation has enormous ramifications: suddenly, information is free of everything that tied it to the physical, spatial realm it once inhabited. The time-space compression effect rendered by the internet has proved to be a massive boon, allowing millions of people around the world to experience music collections in a way not previously imagined. Indeed, McLuhan obsessed over this pattern in his “Laws of Media”, which characterize the way media changes. McLuhan points out that as new media enhances new facets of perception and acquisition for its users, the old media obsolesces. Although CDs and vinyl are by no means dead (the sudden resurgence of vinyl collection among young music fans, for instance, merits another article altogether), they make way for digital file and the culture of free information, which logically follow it.

A number of people involved in the community see music blogging as the next logical step after the closure of oink!, a torrent hosting site that emphasized high quality audio and information-rich downloads. Oink! served as a centralized hub through which users could leach and seed a wide variety of media files. Music blogs, conversely, are a decentralized network which requires the participation of friends, fans and musicians. Digitizing music in the highest quality possible is of primary importance- not only as an act of preservation as CDs and vinyl become obsolete, but as a means of spreading the good word about our favorite musicians.

We all care about digitizing music in the highest quality possible, not only as an act of preservation as CDs and vinyl become obsolete, but as a means of spreading the good word about our favorite musicians. Unlike oink!, the music blog community felt temporarily free of real conflict from the media corporations which so publicly hassled peer-to-peer services and their users. Because our sites are decentralized and only loosely affiliated with each other, the project feels like one that reaches towards a homemade utopian collection, the perusal of which recalls the sensation, perhaps, of walking through the endless hallways of a library. Online audiophiles have developed a system also nostalgic for the record shop. Although vinyl collection itself may have shifted to a (growing) niche market, the spirit of discovering a complete record in high quality is retrieved in the music blog: sifting through the crates and stumbling on gold has never been easier. Bloggers’ insistence on audio files being ripped at a high bit rate or in “lossless” formats, and with their original art and liner notes, represents a continued dedication to the tenets of the vinyl crate. Author Nick Hornby even said of music blogs, “‘It took me longer than it should have done to work out that the internet is one giant independent record shop – thousands and thousands of cute little independent record shops.’”

John Perry Barlow, CC 3.0

“If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?”  – John Perry Barlow

Google’s action is one of the first public confrontational move to the private sphere towards music blogs. The same criticisms that corporations lobbied at Napster and Kazaa are of course reiterated in the case of user-run download sites: that it is theft, it is piracy, that artists are losing money because of it. But the truth is that, like the analog media and retail spaces they made their money in, the corporations who have kicked, screamed, and sued the pants off of their own consumer base are becoming irrelevant. Instead of seeing the potential of digital networks and capitalizing on it like users did, they clung to a relic of the analog age: the copyright. As laws shift from strengthening the law’s original intent to protect artists to tightening the regulation of the actions of millions of individuals, the ease of digital file sharing eludes an easy intellectual property law retrofit– precisely because it doesn’t fit. John Perry Barlow, the author of 1996′s seminal “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” and a well-known internet governance activist, writes in 1994, at the beginning of the digital age: “If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?”

Policy has largely ignored this conundrum and instead chosen to protect the music industry’s profiteers who cling to the copyright in light of its clear incompatibility. The distinct shift in policy, like Canada’s C-60 and C-61, which essentially eliminate the legal exceptions of “fair dealing”, show that governments have stopped pretending like they’re protecting artists from theft and are working solely in the interests of copyright owners, rarely the musicians themselves. The sheer multitude of violations make these laws impossible to enforce (even the founder of oink! was declared not guilty, though the scare tactic was effective), and smart musicians know that the best thing they can do for themselves is get their work into peoples’ iTunes accounts one way or another. As blogger Rob Sheridan put it, “The best music was always made by people who weren’t in it for the money, anyway.”

Though Google has shown its will to be firm, none of the targeted bloggers have been found guilty of piracy yet and some have even come back up. So as we forge towards a collective digital music library, where one’s personal collection is limited only by their taste, it remains to be seen how policymakers and the whiny, outdated CEOs who still have a say in the rules will deal with what might be the future of music collection. What is clear is that we’re not slowing down and that there’s no use clinging to a model of ownership which simply doesn’t hold in the digital age.