Rants & Raves
Rip. Mix. Burn.
Not a whole lotta love for the recording industry. A typical note on February's cover story: "When the music dinosaurs expire, nobody will care but their accountants." A few mixed in career advice with their schadenfreude: "Those unemployed record execs could get jobs manning the customer support lines for our new broadband connections!" To the slighted partisans of EMusic (definitely a downloader's paradise) and Estonia (not a pirate's paradise), we hear you. (Special shoutout to the Baltic booster who asked, "Can we blame construction company who has built a house where owner of the house has established brothel?") As for the RIAA's Hilary Rosen, some damned the suits, not the spokesperson; others were equal opportunity destroyers: "In this battle of might vs. right, she can't be both. She deserves every dollar and derisive jab she gets, nothing less, nothing more." You can stop hating: Hilary's hanging up her flack hat by year's end.
Money for Nothing
The Recording Industry Association of America loves to use sales figures: Numbers are down, after all, and that simply must be due to piracy, right? ("The Year the Music Dies," Wired 11.02.) Well, there are other explanations, some of which actually incorporate facts. CD shipments went from 1.1 billion units in 2000 to 968.6 million in 2001; income went from $14.3 billion to $13.7 billion. That's a 10.3 percent decrease in units, a 4.1 percent decrease in sales. But if you look at the actual number of releases, there were 12,000 fewer albums put out by the major labels in 2001 than in 1999. So in fact, the industry has dramatically increased its per-album profit. It's pretty clear - labels cut back on new artist investments and raised album prices. You can go through all of the RIAA-posted statistics, and not only don't you find its lost $4 billion, you can't even begin to find any loss not attributable to its own sales and marketing. Piracy isn't a factor.
The major labels dish up a small percentage of recorded music. They act in very expensive collusion with commercial radio stations, through "independent promoters," to pay for airplay. The Internet is a threat to this nice little deal - not because of piracy, primarily, but because of choice. If you're buying downloads from EMusic or MP3.com by artists not heard on the radio, you're probably not buying major-label fare like Britney Spears.
Dave Haynie
Upper Pittsgrove, New Jersey
As a musician and music teacher, I eagerly await the demise of the recording industry as we know it. And I am hastening the arrival of that day in a way that's perfectly legal - I buy only used CDs. Also: You are right about Sony ("The Civil War Inside Sony," Wired 11.02). I just purchased a NetMD MZ-N707, and I can't even record my own practice sessions for digital upload. I hate to say this, but MP3 will reign supreme. iPod, anyone?
Candice Dylhoff
Wheaton, Illinois
As someone who produced a Grammy-nominated album this year (Spanish Harlem Orchestra's Un Gran Dia en el Barrio, Ropeadope/Atlantic), I have, you might say, a vested interest in seeing the record business survive. If CDs were priced more moderately, and the quality of music and its presentation were raised significantly by the Big Five labels, the industry would make a strong and rapid recovery.
As for piracy and file-sharing, labels should simply upload hundreds of low-grade, truncated files of their songs, forcing P2P users to sift through the ersatz files to find one barely worth burning. Once Gnutella and Kazaa are overrun with these files, things will slow down considerably.
The music industry will outlast us all, and in a year or two people will laugh at Charles C. Mann and see that, like all industries in the 21st century, it too will change and become something different -�maybe better - than it has been in the past.
Aaron Luis Levinson
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Much as I enjoyed "The Year the Music Dies," I feel that Charles Mann failed to touch on the people most injured by the peer-to-peer networks: the independent labels and the bands they represent.
Since May 2000, I have been signed with Inception Records, based out of Calgary, Alberta. As with most independent labels, Inception's owner and operator has devoted all of his time and life savings to the label, releasing music he strongly believes in. Things have become bleak for the underground since conventional CD distributors have refused to carry smaller labels, turning eager fans to piracy.
In return, artists like me watch as our sales drop. I've accrued debts far beyond my conceivable means and contemplated quitting music entirely, since I can't afford the equipment costs.
There are always going to be people making music just because they have the undying need to. It seems that, from now on, only those with a trust fund are going to be able to afford to grow.
Charles Rehill
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Ripping Hillary
I'd just like to give Hilary Rosen a personal thank-you ("Hating Hilary," Wired 11.02) for getting me kicked off the network of a certain Wisconsin university for the two years I attended. Did I get booted for sharing MP3 files? No, an FTP agent crawled my server and listed my files on the Internet (a whopping total of about 100 at the time, all of which I ripped myself and owned). Thank you, Hilary, for helping turn my pricey education into a nightmare, when I hadn't shared a single file. You truly are a saint and a do-gooder.
Eric Harris
Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin
Hilary Rosen says sales are down because of the Internet. True - but not just from file-sharing. If I want a CD, I find it used on eBay and pay half to two-thirds less than the price in a record store. Hilary was right, back in the mid-'90s, to say that digital delivery is the future - my, what a beautiful thing 20/20 hindsight has proven to be! The RIAA has only itself to blame in all this for two reasons: (1) turning its back on the future as Hilary saw it; and (2) the exorbitant cost of CDs.
Doug Litten
Kingsport, Tennessee
Flooded With Information - and Emotion
Regarding Jim Lewis' "Memory Overload" (View, Wired 11.02): To quote Colin Blakemore, "Man might not go out with a bang of his own creation, nor freeze his race to death by stealing the energy resources of the earth. He might merely drown himself in a flood of information."
Lawrence Kelly
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Jim Lewis aptly states the problem in today's record-everything world - how do you find what's important without watching everything? What's missing is the age-old craft of librarianship: selecting, indexing, preserving, and providing access. But where are the Internet librarians? Google and its friends don't come close. Their query results are the equivalent of ripping out 50,000 pages from books, periodicals, brochures, and random snippets of jetsam - which may or may not apply to the query - and neatly stacking them in front of the patron. HP ran an ad: "What the Internet needs is an old-fashioned librarian." What librarians need is a new-fashioned sense of purpose.
Bill Lund
Provo, Utah
UNDO
9 Danke: US-born rapper Tech N9ne marches to the beat of a different drummer than German band Tech-9 ("The Race to Kill Kazaa," Wired 11.02).
Supersize Everything!: Lisa Young is a professor of nutrition and food studies and consultant at NYU (Infoporn, Wired 10.12).
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