There’s a reason Prince made it onto Time’s 100 Most Influential Celebrities list. His musical legacy is easily apparent, and his opinions are still making headlines. Recently, the purple-clad eccentric has endured great scorn for his statement, “The Internet’s completely over.” Just so you know he’s serious, Prince has banned his music from YouTube and iTunes, shut down his own website, and announced his newest album 20TEN will only be distributed as a free CD inside the British paper the Daily Mirror (much to the chagrin of my wife and sis-in-law, huge fans).
After blasting online music distributors, Prince calls the technology itself a fad that’s on the way out: “The Internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.” Obviously, he’s out of touch; MTV was a diversion, not a tool that expanded the potential accomplishments of virtually every business and individual in the world. Nor were millions of people physically addicted to MTV and its content.
Though his statement is demonstrably false, there’s something to the sentiment behind it. I’ve rarely bought mp3s online that I could buy on a physical format for two reasons: first, lower sound quality (to bring the file sizes down, they remove frequencies and decrease the audio’s resolution), and I prefer the limitation of having to choose and listen to one CD at a time. Just browsing through a collection of mp3s ripped from the same CDs, I appall myself, getting so easily bored and skipping through music that I find exhilarating when I commit to it. Despite an age difference of three decades, Prince and I find solidarity in this anachronism.
But aside from personal taste, the problem with online mp3s is that the music industry has long been plagued by piracy– much more than TV or film due to smaller file sizes. Despite the option of cheap, convenient, buffet-style digital music stores, pirates are still ubiquitous, and they cost record labels serious money.
For those conservatives not familiar with the concept of receiving a good or service without paying for it, online piracy is the unholy union of the West’s appalling entitlement mentality, anti-corporate zealotry, and a warped sense of economic progress. For the uninitiated, here is a list of what I’ve dubbed the Six Levels of Piracy:
Level 1: Listening to burned CDs from friends (technically illegal, but akin to the virtuous Before Christ residents of Dante’s Inferno)
Level 2: Downloading mp3s from music blogs which host songs without permission from artists
Level 3: Paying for a Rapidshare Premium account but not paying for music
Level 4: Downloading torrents
Level 5: Leaking content onto torrent sites
Level 6: Openly promoting piracy
What online pirates (generally anti-corporation leftists) fail to realize is that music distribution, like any business, has costs that need to be made up when selling its product: payroll for songwriters, artists, producers, and recording engineers who actually make the music; manufacturing, packaging, and shipping CDs; promotion, marketing, and expensive ads called music videos; plus administrative and legal costs and taxes (most labels are international and have to pay European VAT taxes). Then, retailers buy the music and have to sell it at a higher price to cover their own costs and make a profit (profit is how these people stay in business and make sure we can still have music in the future).
Artists such as 9 Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor have fueled pirates’ costless fantasy world, lamenting,
“Wait – you sell [CDs] for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they’ll sign anything.”
In response, let’s think up a little analogy that progressives like Mr. Reznor can understand. If the benevolent feds charge NASA with building a new shuttle that will collect tons of pure gold on a distant planet, the astronaut who pilots the shuttle will not receive the majority of the gold. Congress funded the building of the ship. They authorized the mission. They took the financial risk, so they will reap the majority of the financial reward. The astronaut will still get copious amounts of money; it’s just that most will be from the speaking tour after the mission.
Regardless, Reznor and fellow ’90s sensations Radiohead have tried a novel idea–allowing customers to set their own price for albums. In 2007, Radiohead released a self-produced album, In Rainbows, and before it hit stores, anyone could log onto their website and type in how much they would pay for the twelve tracks. I’ll admit that I paid nothing, mostly because I find Radiohead disgustingly overrated. The band hasn’t released any sales figures for the experiment, but they’ve said they won’t do it again.
For bands such as Radiohead, their established fan base (which exists largely because of the evil music industry corporations) can potentially make this donation-based distribution work. It may also work for smaller indie bands that have low production costs. But for developing artists trying to go national, a small core of rabid, paying fans likely won’t be able to cover the costs of ambitious, professional recordings, so I doubt that many will adopt In Rainbows‘ strategy. Sites with free song streaming plus ads, such as Grooveshark.com, show potential also, but between the Wall Street Journal, Hulu, and (allegedly) MySpace deciding to adopt subscription-based services for online content, this business model might only yield the results of Keynesianism in time.
Therefore, what Prince says may be true to a point. Digital distribution of music could end up a bust; that may be the reason that sales of vinyl records are on the rise. It’s certainly a much more credible assertion than Radiohead’s Thom Yorke predicting that the entire music industry will collapse within “months” (he gets a pass from the press, cuz he’s a courageous crusader against climate change). Regardless, it’s good to see such a bizarre, entertaining character–read the whole interview; you’ll thank me–retain some semblance of free thought instead of slipping into leftist orthodoxy after so many years in the music business.
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