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“Don’t you know how to be dumb? Are you
ready to take your place in the modern museum of mistakes?”
— Elvis Costello
Napster is doomed.
It’s finally been cornered by the legal attacks launched by the attorneys
retained by the Recording Industry Association of America, an organization
that purports to represent the interests of all the major labels. Except
Bertelsmann, the only one smart enough to know that it’s better to figure
out some means of co-opting your biggest threat — make it your best friend,
or at least let it think you’re its best friend — before you eat it.
But why do that
when you can spend millions and millions of dollars on bad legal advice
trying to eradicate the thing and engendering long-lasting contempt among
millions of potential consumers instead? Napster did a lot more for music
retailing than the other methods the record business tried: payola in the
1950s or the drugola of the 1970s, to name two of the stupider and more
illegal ones. Is that, finally, what flummoxed the record companies? Even as
Napster is being pinioned on the injunctions of judge Marilyn Hall Patel,
its estimated 64 million users are flocking to Freenet, Gnutella and
LimeWire, just to name three of the alternatives. And there will be others.
Watching the record companies try to deal with Napster has been a lot like
watching some Jurassic pas-de-deux, with a 40-tonne lizard with a very small
brain trying to stomp a smaller, smarter, faster mammal.
Equally hilarious
is hearing the record companies howl about the intellectual property rights
of their hard-done-by artists — the same artists who they’ve never had any
compunction about signing to contracts that make indentured servitude look
like enlightened employment. Whenever an artist gets signed to a major
label, everything that artist does is charged against royalties — every mile
of a tour, every gallon of diesel fuel in the tour bus, every second of
expensive studio time, every ounce of fourth-rate, stepped-on cocaine. Those
royalties are calculated against 90% of sales, because when music was
encoded as a single spiral scratch, it was etched in Bakelite, which
shattered. About 10% of the 78s broke in transit. Music hasn’t been
distributed that way for about 50 years, but the record companies never
bothered to change that breakage clause.
Now those same
lovely outfits complain about Napster eating into their profits. “How will
we nurture the artists of tomorrow?” they wail. “Artists” like Puffy Combs,
Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit and Marshall Mathers? If I thought I could
contribute in some small way to starving those wretched facsimiles out of
existence, I’d be shoplifting their CDs, posting the contents on a
high-speed server and sending spam e-mail inviting strangers to help
themselves. Although Napster allegedly interferes with record companies’
nurturing artists, blowing millions of dollars on legal fees somehow
doesn’t. They’re probably being charged against Eminem’s royalties. We can
only hope.
This shouldn’t be a
surprise. At least four years ago, Musician magazine wrote a long,
detailed feature explaining what was coming, and that if music companies
were smart, they’d get there first — advice they ignored. Eighteen months
ago “MP3” replaced “sex” as the most common search term in every search
engine on the Web. That would also have been about the same time that about
a half-dozen portable MP3 players came on the market. The record companies
still didn’t get it.
A study by no less
than American Demographics shows that Napster users are the most
enviable and committed consumers that music-biz weasels could have dreamed
of. They spend more money on standard retail music, for example, than their
non-Napstering counterparts. Record companies hire “virtual street teams” to
talk up their artists and product in chat rooms and in various other locales
on the Web. That’s meant to mesh with the give-aways to folks on the street,
DJs and such — so-called early-adopter opinion/taste leaders — by actual
street teams.
Any half-smart
record company would have figured out that you post something fans can’t get
anywhere else on Napster — an alternate mix, a demo version, a live
performance — with an audio commercial welded to the beginning, stuck in the
middle or right at the end. Fans can’t listen to what they’re getting until
they’ve downloaded it, so they’re bound to hear it at least once. And given
the way product and its advertising are blurred these days, they’ll probably
play the commercial for their friends, or at least it will be replicated as
others share the file. The method was detailed in all those anti-drug-abuse
movies they used to show us in school: “ ‘The first one’s free,’ says the
pusher.” And we all remember where that marketing strategy leads. In order
not to understand this, you’d have to be incredibly stupid. But if you were
that dumb, you’d be working in the record business. |
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