Downloaded music. Now there’s a moral quandary, a thought experiment for our times. Consider the system: I download a song, listen to it and enjoy it. I harm no-one else, nor deprive them of any opportunities, yet this is an immoral action. Confusing, no? As we all know, the argument is that if everyone got their music for free, the artists wouldn’t have any reason to make more, which Would Be Bad. Ah, well. Bang goes that nice sharing idea someone had. Guess we’ll all have to keep trudging into Virgin Megastore and handing over a tenner an album after all. But wait! We don’t have to do that, because that argument makes as much sense as my face. Let us examine some of the points.
Nobody would make music if there wasn’t any money to be made from selling the recordings? Now my history’s a little hazy on this, but I’m fairly certain that music was invented before the gramophone, and that people have been writing singing and playing music for the last few millennia at least. How many people do you know who make music? How many people do you know who make any money from it? For me at least, the answers to those two questions are, respectively, lots and none.
However, let me explain my position a little further before you start thinking of me as Johnny Socialist, dedicated to tearing down the palace of the Gallagher brothers and bankrupting that nice Will Young. CD sales are by no means the only way that artists pay the bills. There are merchandise, gigs, TV appearances, product promotion. Even without receiving any money from recordings, they will still be plenty rich. Anyway, these people are rock stars–beyond groupies, what compensation do they need? Perhaps more importantly, half the money you pay for a CD goes directly to the record shop where you bought it. Of the remaining 50%, only a fifth goes to the artist. Just 10% of the cover price of a CD ends up in the pockets of the artist. And of course, one third of discs sold in the world today are pirated. None of that money goes to the artists, and a lot of it benefits organized crime. So are we starting to think this is a slightly inefficient system?
But what’s the alternative? Allow non-commercial sharing, and if people like what they hear they send the artist a couple of quid online. People are willing to chuck the odd quid at buskers; wouldn’t they do the same for Coldplay?
So we all get to listen to more music, the artists are rewarded fairly and get to keep their coke-fuelled orgies: what’s the downside? Well, unemployment would beckon for the hordes of record industry publicists, marketers and promoters, record shops would be in trouble, and EMI’s shares would take a sharp downturn. Not too much to weep about for you or me, but as far as the music industry is concerned, the collapse of civilisation. They are fighting for their survival, and are currently doing a pretty good job of it. They want to keep the whole inefficient system churning over because it’s in their interest to do so. Can you really blame the little tykes for that?
That doesn’t mean we should let them. The system, by which I mean the law, needs changing, so write to your MP. The extent to which this issue has stayed off the political agenda is astonishing. Here is something one of the three main parties might like to add to their next manifesto. “A Labour/Conservative/Liberal Democrat government would pass legislation establishing the legality of non-commercial copying and sharing of music.” Nothing would happen overnight, but slowly, the industry would begin to change. Business models would be rewritten, and a new culture of music would start to grow in the UK, where people listen to a lot more, and a lot more varied, music. Without the clunky mechanism of the music industry, change would be more fluid.
As good as it might sound, this isn’t going to happen. Almost certainly it isn’t. This gradual, legally sanctioned change from a society that buys music to a society that shares it, just ain’t happening. When was the last time you heard Tony Blair discuss copyright law? Well, he’s not about to start. Change is coming though, that much is guaranteed. Here’s one of the reasons why: The next generation of optical-disc, Sony’s DVD busting Blu-Ray disc, will allow you to store 750 albums worth of MP3s on a disc the same size as a single CD. Holographic Versatile Discs, currently on the drawing board but likely to be flying off the shelves a little more than a decade from now, have a theoretical capacity 160 times that of Blu-Ray. When someone hands you a CD-Case filled with 120,000 albums, how long are you going to continue chucking your tenners at Richard Branson? Music will be free. Get used to it.
But I’m not worried about music, music can look after itself. People enjoy making music, and in the grand scheme of things, it costs virtually nothing to produce. The same is true for books, but how many people make a living from writing novels? Very few, but a million more are writing them and will continue to do so. So when a commercially viable e-book reader hits the market place, using E-Ink that doesn’t strain your eyes and you can cuddle up in bed with, the fact that you can get your friend to e-mail you The Da Vinci Code won’t mean the end of fiction. What all this might mean, though, is the end of big-budget films. You can’t fund a $200m Hollywood blockbuster through tips. What are the alternatives? BBC-style Government subsidy? The mainstreaming of homemade hobby films? I don’t know.
All I know is that the digital revolution has only just begun, and that I’m excited.