p2pnet.net News Feature:- Remember when the tobacco industry used to commission studies from various market research/pr firms to ‘prove’ nicotine isn’t addictive, and then trot the results out as if they had some basis in fact?

There are a lot of similarities between Big Tobacco and Big Music.

Both were, and are, caught out in one falsehood after another, both routinely distort statistics to back up their fabrications, both employ teams of highly paid, extremely skillful, truth adjustors whom they use to bamboozle print and electronic media reporters, and both are enthusiastic proponents of the Goebbels doctrine:

• No matter how big the lie, if it’s repeated often enough, people come to believe it.

Big Music is presenting and fostering its own Goebbelogue: that file sharing is bad - very bad; that anyone who engages in it is a criminal; and, that only ‘product’ made by the Big Five labels and sold through one or other of the corporate online music stores they supply and support is legal.

Because instead of embracing p2p as the new, exciting way to distribute music as many other businesses are starting to do (and as pointed out, ironically, by Hiawatha Bray here) Big Music is clinging desperately to outmoded business models and strategies forged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rather than using file sharing as an amazing new sales vehicle which will enable them to sell masses of ‘product’ to hundreds of millions of people in a way never before possible, the labels are saying the new technology is ruining their business.

“You simply cannot live in a marketplace, where there is one unleashed animal in that marketplace, unlicensed. It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in and labored over …”

That’s Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). However, he’s not talking about file sharing. His statement came in 1982 and the subject of his diatribe was the VCR.

Yet today Hollywood - which also once railed against the player piano - hauls in millions of dollars from video tapes.

A p2pnet reader says here:

“File sharing actually HELPS the music industry. Since I have been exposed to file sharing, I have BOUGHT more albums than I did before. The reason is that I am able to listen to one or more tracks from an album and decide from what I hear if I want to hear more.

“I have been exposed to artists that I would never have been able to hear by mainstream means. Radio and music channels have become narrower and narrower in the past several years with tight rotation schedules and short playlists which leaves the listener looking for alternate ways to find out about new artists or even old artists that do not recieve the exposure they deserve.

“Seeking to prosecute the people who support the music industry, the music lovers, who are every bit as passionate about the art of music as the artists themselves, is shortsighted and narrowminded.

“The recording industry is on the wrong track, so to speak, in viewing each individual song downloaded as an album sale lost. Instead they should see it for the powerful free advertising medium it is, one that requires active effort on the part of the consumer.

“Did it ever occur to anyone in the music industry that sales are declining because no one wants to buy a crap album for one or two songs they are going to be too embarrassed to admit they liked in a couple years?

“The recording industry will have to learn how to adapt and survive because the internet and information age is upon us. Music lovers want and deserve better quality and if the industry is not going to give it to them, they are going to go out and find it themselves.”

Well said. But instead of paying attention to this kind of reasoning, the Big Five - Universal Music (France), Warner Music (US), EMI (UK), Sony Music (Japan) and BMG (Germany) - have just launched a concerted, world-wide attack against its customers.

Much of the focus is, for the moment, on Canada where Big Music expected an instant-win when, through its CRIA, it demanded that a Canadian judge order five Canadian ISPs to hand over the identities of 29 people the labels accused of sharing ‘product’ via p2p networks, breaking copyright restrictions in the process.

However, to the music industry’s shock and dismay, Justice Konrad von Finckenstein threw its demands out the window.

Goebbelization
CRIA is short for Canadian Recording Industry Association, described as a ‘trade’ association. It’s owned lock, stock and barrel by the Big Five record labels and, like the scores of identical music industry subsidiaries around the world, its job is to Goebbelize the media and intimidate the public.

The CRIA, “wanted to go after people from coast to coast who subscribed to one of the five largest Internet service providers - Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus and Videotron,” says Tyler Hamilton in his Toronto Star article here.

But, “If creating ‘music-swapping chill’ was CRIA’s biggest goal, it’s unclear whether it worked or made matters worse,” he continues. “If CRIA’s goal was also to build a solid test case likely to move beyond preliminary court proceedings, the group’s strategy failed miserably.

“The lawyer representing Bell Canada made a good point on Day 3 of courtroom arguments. He asked why CRIA felt it necessary to drag five large ISPs into court, when it could have better accomplished its legal objectives by focusing its litigation on one ISP and one music swapper.

“What I suspect this lawyer was hinting at, but didn’t say, is that CRIA should have avoided the big splash and instead struck a deal with Montreal-based Videotron, a high-speed cable provider that - unlike its four peers - was openly in favour of the lawsuits and more than willing to hand over the identity of any suspected subscriber.

“Of course, privacy legislation prevented Videotron from volunteering the subscriber information, meaning CRIA still needed to get a court order. But in this scenario, with Videotron in full cahoots, resistance to the order would have been minimal at best.

“Instead, CRIA pulled Bell, Rogers, Telus, and Shaw into the skirmish, pushed these communications powerhouses into the media spotlight, and in return got a fight that they should have expected.

“That resistance ultimately led the judge to deny any disclosure of music swappers’ identities. Shaw, in particular, with the help of two intervening privacy groups, did a solid job of making mincemeat out of CRIA’s evidence.

“And this leads to CRIA’s second mistake - or mistakes, considering there were a number of embarrassing mistakes wrapped under one umbrella. The organization overconfidently walked into court with a lot of assumptions and sloppily assembled evidence that Justice von Finckenstein refused to blindly accept, as some U.S. courts have done over the years.”

Lies, lies and more lies
In the same way Big Tobacco assembled teams of experts to undertake studies to ‘prove’ nicotine isn’t addictive, Big Music is paying millions of dollars to produce studies which ‘prove’ its business is being destroyed by file sharing.

However, “Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,” say Felix Oberholzer (Harvard Business School) and Koleman Strumpf (UNC Chapel Hill) in their empirical analysis The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales.

Their report decries music industry facts and figures and you can be 100% certain other studies similarly giving the lie to Big Music will follow Oberholzer and Strumpf.

In the meanwhile, file sharing is here to stay.

For the first time in history they, the buyers, not the sellers, have control.

Thanks to the Net, former customers of the major record labels have learned they no longer have spend $15-$20 on shabby, cookie-cutter CDs featuring cookie-cutter performers singing cookie-cutter songs.

Instead, they can go online where millions of examples of unique music from around the world are instantly available. For free.

It’s called file-sharing.

And while the dinosaurs of Big Music sink slowly and inexorably into their tar-pits of lies, people around the world are enjoying the new freedoms brought by the Net.

As one p2pnet reader says here:

“Declaring war on your consumers is just going to piss us off. Not in a million years will you be able to stop file sharing through legal means, or technological means. In fact, the longer you take to adapt, the heavier your losses will be.”

Another says here, “Tell me how the mainstream artist today is suffering from P2P. They don’t look poor to me. They just look greedy.”

Yet another states: “As a lawyer and musician with published recordings, I can tell you that Canada’s copyright law specifically permits making a recording of copyrighted audio works for personal use without copyright infringement. There is a mandatory royalty in Canada on every piece of recording media sold, designed explicitly to collect royalties for performers whose works might be recorded for personal collections, and distributed in the same percentages as radio royalties. The judge’s decision was quite rational and based on the law. The music industry did not present evidence of harm that would justify infringing privacy legislation, nor did they present evidence that the identities they wanted had even performed the activity they claimed. Given that the recent studies show that downloading does not harm music sales, it will be a difficult fight for the music industry in Canada. I am personally surprised that Americans are so quick to abandon personal privacy in favour of corporate rights, which are necssarily amoral and concerned only with the pursuit of money.”

And another says here: ”Canada addressed the problem of consumers copying pre-recorded music back in the days of the cassette tape by slapping a surcharge on blank tapes. The money from this surcharge is used to pay royalities according to a formula based on participating musicians’ sales, in much the same way that library book copying and borrowing is used to compensate writers.

“This leaves people free to make party mixes and such without the artists being ‘deprived’ of royalties. Musicians are as safe as houses in Canada because the government has found a way to make the copier pay without limiting their freedom.

“I am unconvinced, however, that copying is a serious problem. From what I have seen of the crap that is downloaded, nobody would pay for most of this stuff at any price. A former friend of mine downloaded things like the old comic song “Shaving Cream”. It isn’t as if there is a real demand (desire plus willingness to pay) in a real economic sense for 99% of the crap you can download. How much money does an eleven year old have to spend on $30 CDs? A lot more than I did at that age, but dick-all.

“Also, even if people are downloading stuff that they would formerly have purchased, they still have the money they would formerly have spent and still tend to spend it on music - they just have a better idea of what they are buying when they plop down the price of dinner in a moderately priced sit-down restaurant for half an hour or an hour of music.

“Myself, I seldom like more than two songs on an album unless it is a classic or a compilation of classics. So if I were downloading, I would be downloading stuff I wouldn’t be buying because there is no way I would pay full price for it. $30 for three minutes of decent music and an hour of turgid rubbish? Ha!

“The wonderful thing about the Internet is that a copy of anything costs almost nothing. It is a giant free lending library that delivers to your home.

“Nobody complains about public libraries putting bookstores out of business because bookstore owners know from experience that public libraries increase REAL demand for books. Many patrons wouldn’t buy the books they borrow - doesn’t matter how many times they borrow, it doesn’t cost a penny to the booksellers but rather increases sales slightly because libraries buy books for people who can’t buy books for themselves - many do buy the books they borrow after checking them out to see if they are worth paying for, many people buy more books after learning to read thanks to a public library. Some of us, like me, buy more books even though we live only five minutes away from a million or more free books.

“Rule of Thumb: Never open a bookstore in a town with no public library.

“I wish that the music industry would stop being such jerks and learn to adapt their business models to reality. You don’t sell any music sending kids or their parents to jail. Well, maybe some gangsta rap.”

Watch this space : )

Jon Newton

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2004 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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