The music business like many other creative arenas has a faction that creates for the sake of the art and pushing the boundaries and sharing ideas to expand the medium. There is another group on the other side who looks to profit from the audiences’ desire to obtain and hear the music and finally the groups that fall in between the two and feel they should be rewarded financially for their hard work and creative efforts.

How is music different from any other protected digital file? If a P2P was created to distribute software it would last about two seconds. So what is the bigger picture going to be as to how this should shake out? Music and video fall into the realm of entertainment and need to be aware of the Internet as being a giant distribution channel. The playback and content selection is at the users discretion and the files exist to be grabbed, saved, reviewed and possibly shared at a later date. When it comes to the Internet, in its present state, it is difficult to control the distribution points or to pinpoint any one hard drive as being responsible for any on thing. It exists as a single entity and the creators of the content need to learn to create content keeping that in mind.

As the world enters this electronic space there will be less control to govern activity of users in other countries. All the more reason to look for answers that work with the direction of an always on, always connected world.

Creative Commons’ ideas on having multiple categories for rights management is a step in the right direction. There is a lot of content out there presently that people would love to share and I think it would help to advance the field. The idea of everything being available for anyone to hack, sample and republish is intriguing as far as what the outcome may be. The thought of an onslaught of mediocrity based on quality work is frightening but after that is sifted through quality work would emerge. There should remain distribution channels that would prevent a free for all when something enters the market.
Locked or encoded technology should be at the discretion of the owners. There should be an expected period where a product can generate a return for the artists in order to allow growth. Big business and lawmakers need a flexible structure that will generate a return on investment but also free up the content to easily move through the networked space.

That being said, I think Peer to Peer file sharing is bad for the music’s big business. P2Ps are turning their whole world upside down and are forcing them to re-examine how they operate. They will need to spend a lot of money on making a lot of mistakes until they discover where they need to be. When Apple created iTunes, they all jumped on board and now that it is a success they want to start raising the prices. Greed will always be their driving force and eventually they will all probably liquidate their libraries to an online service like iTunes because the reality of it is, much smaller companies will be able to offer bands the same services for a lot less but the big companies will not want to compete.

The music industry will survive and prosper probably in a better state then it exists now, benefiting the artists and forward thinkers not the ones peddling CDs.

Originaly written for:

November 8, 2005

MD23: Theories of Electronic Communications II
Sean Carton