[Dixielandjazz] Pain of music industry

[Bill Haesler]

Dear Friends,
This article from today's Sydney Morning Herald will only be of interest to
those of us concerned about the politics and ethics of copying CDs, the
current 'download culture' and the problems in today's record industry.
It is 1500 words long.
DELETE NOW if this is NOT your thing.
Kind regards,
Bill.

**********************************************************
PAIN OF A MUSIC INDUSTRY IN TRANSITION

Online copying is an ultimatum for retailers. Give up or work with it,
writes Anthony O'Grady.

People have always had difficulty with the part of copyright law that says
"you do not have the right to copy". Sabiene Heindl, the general manager of
Music Industry Piracy Investigations, says: "Currently, 18 per cent of the
population uses file-sharing systems, averaging 30 song downloads per month.
That's 2.8 million people illegally swapping 1 billion songs a year."

Download culture would not exist without a corresponding upload culture.
"There are online communities where individuals get kudos for the number of
files they upload to the internet," says Heindl. "It's not unusual for each
person to upload 10,000 songs."

And those figures, she says, are just the background chorus of a universal
refrain. "We don't have exact figures for how many times each store-bought
CD is copied," she says, "but record stores continually report they're
selling just one CD single to groups of teenagers."

It's not just teenagers looking for a free Top 10 top-up. Who hasn't been to
a Saturday afternoon barbecue and noted the host's music collection consists
of copied CDs? Who knows whether those CDs were copied from authentic or
pirated products? Piracy puts an estimated 4.5 million illegal CDs into the
Australian market each year.

And then there are music blogs - enthusiasts posting their record
collections online. There are at least 50 million blogs offering free songs
and albums, most of them copyright. There is also the billion-plus songs
that are offered free, no copyright attached, on artists' sites like MySpace
and YouTube. (MySpace and YouTube also host illegal files by the hundreds of
thousands.)

The biggest online music marketer, iTunes, co-opts the role of record
companies to espouse new music by offering a free single of the week - the
two most recent are from local indie outfits, the Basics and Old Man River.
"It's not rocket science to translate the sum of this activity to lost
sales," says Heindl.

And lost jobs. Record companies are shedding executives. Last fortnight it
was EMI Australia's turn to slash its senior management team. In the US and
Britain, music retail chains have closed and this year is tipped as the year
global reality will affect Australian music retailers.

The cause of this turmoil is people copying music. But copying music has
been rife since the mid-1970s. It is only now record companies are feeling
the impact. As a music carrier, the cassette tape was great for dictation,
the purpose for which it was invented. Yet cassettes soon rivalled, then
outsold vinyl records. Today, despite an official sales figure of zero,
there remains a market for pirated cassettes. "Customs just recently seized
a large haul of them," says Heindl.

By the late '70s, cassette-players incorporated Dolby noise suppression, and
chromium-dioxide cassettes boosted the listening experience. Then the public
went wild for the Sony Walkman - music that travelled with you. The lesson
was that people wanted their music portable. The cassette also empowered
people to create their playlists - the car-tape of favourite songs, the
mix-tape that was a gift of music to another, the copy-tape that saved
wearing outthe precious vinyl.

The recording business initiated a public awareness campaign on the wrongs
of home taping - that home taping is against the law and hurts musicians by
depriving them of income.

The public didn't see it that way.

Isn't playing a record at a party public broadcasting? And ifI've bought the
album, why should I have to buy a separate cassette of the same music for
the car? Anyway, if a multinational recording company says it's wrong to
tape, it should speak to the multinational company that makes cassette
players with high-speed dubbing and one-touch recording.

The public also had difficulty agreeing with the argument thatevery home dub
deprived a musician of income. The counter-argument was that home taping
spread the music, creating demand for the record company package.

Did it really matter? Album sales were on a roll in the 1980s. The 12-inch
vinyl album was the flagship of contemporary rock. Album cover packaging -
double or triple gatefolds, lavish lyric booklets - inspired a slew of rock
album cover books. Yet cassettes, with scaled down and often blurred
artwork, outsold vinyl from 1984. The public wasn't sold on packaging - it
just wanted music in most convenient form.

And then the CD wiped out the cassette. Unlike the cassette, the CD was
formulated to reproduce music. It used a sampling theorem, a series of
digital snapshots, which the human ear hears as a stream of music. CDs
reproduced bass better than vinyl, and had a greater dynamic range than
cassette tape. And, theoretically, a CD never wore out.

Introduced in 1982, CD albums outsold cassettes in 1991. Home taping was
still rife but people first had to buy the CD. And, even though CDs cost
more than twice the price of records, generations of music buyers junked
vinyl and reconstituted their collections on CD.

The first CD burners were sold in the late '90s, costing between$1000 and
$10,000. Blank discs cost $20 each.

But by 2002 CD burners were standard hardware for home computers and blank
CDs cost about $2. The public switched from home tapingto home burning. But
people still had to access a CD. Either buy itor borrow it or ask a friend
to burn a copy. Copying remained alocal activity.

And then music became freely available on the net via a compressed file
called MP3. Previously it had been a fruitless exercise to upload or
download music, because music was a complex wave file that took what seemed
several lifetimes to download.

But MP3s were a tenth the size of wave files. They didn't have the fidelity
of wave files but the basic idea of the music was retained. And, just like
cassettes before them, MP3s rapidly improved in quality.

The public spoke. MP3s replaced the CDs. The ubiquity of the iPod and a
profusion of lesser brand-name MP3 players is the Sony Walkman story writ
larger again. Thirty years of public copying has brought record companies to
the edge of the precipice but, it seems, the public will not be moved.

Copying is integral to human development. We learn to read, write and speak
by copying, and the histories of art, music, literature and science
illustrate that something new rarely happens without first copying, then
adding. And yet copyright is integral to human endeavour. The Statute of
Anne in 1710 protected authors, publishers and printers from the financial
devastation of rife copying. A golden age for British literature followed.

The story was repeated with US magazines in the first quarter ofthe 19th
century. Recognition of copyright is good for business and good for
musicians, writers and visual artists.

It has been argued that record companies have had their golden era and will
subside to a minor place in the music market. But itis more likely they
will, with great reluctance, change their notion of copyright to accommodate
the realities of copying.

Recent changes to Australian copyright law that recognise consumers' rights
to copy music bought for their own use is a step towards reconciliation with
consumers. Because music has never been more popular or profitable. The
internet is an "open sesame" to an Aladdin's cave of musical treasure.
Touring and music merchandising revenue is at all-time high. Mobile phones
have joined with MP3 players to create ubiquitous listening.

There is another argument that record companies could enjoy anew boom cycle
by freeing up their hold on copyright. But between the prospect of a
glittering future and the dispiriting present is a difficult transition.