10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed
Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by - we're all grownups, let's call a spade a spade - democratizing piracy.
Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.
Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!
Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control
On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday, "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of."
That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".)
However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create.
Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all.
But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs?
Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense.
What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately?
Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them
Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious?
Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace.
MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue.
While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools.
What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.?
Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends.
And Napster?
Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio.
Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands.
It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike.
In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Of course, this all presumes that Ashlee Simpson (or whomever) deserves to be a multi-millionaire based on artistic merits. Is it not enough to be sufficiently talented to fill a concert hall, and make a living that way? Consider the recordings to be free advertising.
Record companies have been screwing artists for decades. Did fronting a little studio time really justify claiming rights to album sales and publishing rights in perpetuity?
Let the RIAA die a slow painful death. The deserve it. Talented artists will always find a way to draw a crowd and make a living.
I'm trying to decided just how much of this article I disagree with. The only people screwing musicians are labels. Because of Napster et al music labels have been drug kicking and screaming into the digital-download age. Technology changed, and they had too much invested in CD technology to even consider online distribution.
Yes, independent musicians still have a tough road to hoe when it comes to marketing their material. That's as true today as it was 10 years ago. The major difference between then and now is the ability for those musicians to spread their music widely through the series of tubes.
Music labels sign musicians, front them cash for the production of their album, and unless they are multiple-gold or platinum selling, they are not seeing a dime of that money.
I'm not quite convinced record sales were ever the most profitable avenue for artists. From what I've read, artists make a lot more money through live performances and merchandising; I thought the system worked by record labels profiting from marketing and selling the music, which in turn made the musicians famous and encouraged people to go to their shows, which made them money. Under that model, piracy doesn't actually affect musicians, and in fact it becomes a new way to get more listeners, who then buy tickets. Really, the people most harmed by the growth of piracy is labels.
Though I'd be very interested in seeing how the average musician's revenue sources break down.
Posted by: http://perpetualstudent.net/blog/
|
December 28, 2009 11:53 AM
Presumably this article is deliberately inflammatory to generate ad views. For a start, downloading songs you don't have the rights to is *not* stealing, it's copyright infringement. Secondly, if you start blaming the fans (i.e. customers), you've probably already lost the battle.
I see most of these issues were raised when this article was first published. You could make a case for better tools for artists without making out piracy has much to do with "so-called" woes of the music industry. Steve Albini tells it well: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ten_years_after_napster_musicians_are_still_gettin.php#comment-140674, as does Chris Vinson: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ten_years_after_napster_musicians_are_still_gettin.php#comment-140773
@Jonathan thanks for pointing that out. It looks like Albini slapped down all of Jolie's assertions about piracy pretty hard, and she basically caved in. I guess RWW is just fishing for traffic by reposting their old inflammatory articles.
This is the second article I've read on ReadWriteWeb. The first one was quite good, I thought (The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media). This one is so one-sided and out-of-touch as to be propaganda.
Guess I'll read one more for the tie-breaker.
The idea is that musicians miss out on the royalties that keep them afloat beyond the success of their music. Once a musician decides to retire, there's nothing to keep the income flowing except royalties or more gigs (thus the return of Phish).
It's not so different from film and television. You get gigs, you get payment for your talent, then you get continual royalties afterward and live off it (the older you get, the less gigs you get).
Working in the film/tv/online media industries and calculating royalties myself, I'm right in the middle of it all. None of the talent is happy, especially the talent that barely scrapes by. The ability of users to steal content like this is causing the downfall of middle-class musicians/actors, and a lot of my friends in Los Angeles as well as New York are suffering for it.
It is most certainly out of touch to believe that all talent is highly paid and can miss out on another $1m or so. The real truth is some musicians are lucky to see more than a few hundred each quarter. Becoming a successful musician/actor takes more work than those reading this blog realize, and this is a confusing time because no one really has the key to creating a profitable online business model which will help transition from prior business models.
The only e-companies that have become successful offer up hard goods (Cafe Press), digital goods (American Grettings, Habbo), retail (Amazon, Zappos), intuitive advertising (DoubleClick, Yahoo!, Google), and premium services/software. No web company has successfully made a profit off of entertainment. Most of those existing today are barely break-even.
The sites mentioned above are experiencing extraordinary losses, and so are many other digital video/music platforms (Last.fm, FineTune, Youtube, Hulu, Rhapsody, and the list of well-known sites goes on).
I work at MTV, so I'm seeing these issues across every form of entertainment-media. Hopefully my comments here will keep a few of you readers informed. I'm not giving an opinion on the matter, just clarifying the post.
@Galen, what about sites like Spotify, the iTunes Music Store, Amie Street, Netflix and Steam? All of those sites make money off of mass market entertainment, and they're all legal piracy alternatives. Yes, they're premium services/software, but the appeal of them is that they present the same content that piracy makes available but in a more attractive and simple way. Piracy will never offer as good a user experience or selection as Netflix, or allow music to stream instantly with one click from Spotify.
Piracy can be beaten. I strongly believe that offering a better product is the right way to do it. As for retiring musicians, I think labels will start earning money again once they figure out how to properly charge users for streaming through advertising and subscription models. We're already seeing the rise of Spotify and Vevo, and that to me signals a bright future.
Also, is Hulu really that unprofitable? You'd think its content providers would shut it down if they felt they weren't getting their money back in ad revenue. Hulu itself may not be profitable, but that's typically how these things are (Facebook only went revenue-positive this year, I think).
Posted by: http://perpetualstudent.net/blog/
|
December 29, 2009 11:15 AM
Tamago started out as a p2p that offered pages for artists and they could put their music on the network and make money. Most musicians didn't know how to open ports on their computer or router and didn't want to learn. Tamago then created UMakeITCool which was more like MySpace but for ecommerce. This is too much of a 'me too' at this point so Joel is in the process of joining UMakeITCool with Tamago's P2P for high res audio, video files and well large files in general so that Tamago saves on bandwidth which is a big cost factor for other eStores and is killing FaceBook.
A real problem is Musicians want to make music, writers want to write and videographers want to video. None like marketing and that is where they have to hustle a bit if they want to sell. That is what the studios were supposed to do but they cherry pick and put all of their promotion money behind a few that they believe will give them the highest return. Unless you're one of the chosen ones you are not much better off than being an indie musician, writer or videographer.
The indie movement is alive and reasonable well but needs a clearing house of some sort where tracks, books, videos can automatically be sent to the appropriate critics to get meaningful reviews.
Another comment on the musicians. There was an artifical high in the music being sold in the 80s and 90s since to get the music you could not buy a single for a buck fifty but rather you had to buy a CD from $14 to $18. This caused an artificially high income for the music studios. This will never be repeated. Of course this also caused an artificially high income for the artists involved as well and that won't be repeated either. Tsk, tsk.
Kal
-- "For a start, downloading songs you don't have the rights to is *not* stealing, it's copyright infringement. Secondly, if you start blaming the fans (i.e. customers), you've probably already lost the battle."
I think its hilarious that we all refuse to accept blame for this. I'm not going to justify my experience, but I will say I am a working musician, and here are the facts:
Someone earlier said they heard that musicians make most of their money through live shows anyway so pirating doesn't really affect them. This is false because musicians used to make more money from album sales than live shows. The album sale used to be the #1 source of money, especially if the band did not have to give most of it to a label. The reason we make more money from shows now IS because of pirating. Album sales slowed when downloading began, and in turn the money made from live performances went up. I'm not commenting on whether this is good or bad, but it is worth noting that musicians make more of their money from shows now because of pirating and so were in fact affected by it.
To prove I'm right, try to imagine a world where illegal downloading had never began. People would still be listening to music, right? Where would they be getting it? Would CD sales have kept going the way they were? Its important to think about what would of happened. I think internet distribution had to happen, whether or not people paid for it. What I think happened is because people had more money to spend because they didnt have to pay for music anymore, they started spending that money on shows and concerts instead. I'm not one to say whether or not the musicians actually lost money in this transaction. Live shows are definitely more common than draw more people than they did 10 years ago. But one thing is for sure. If illegal downloading never happened, that money that we all never spent on music because we downloaded it, that money would have gone to them because we would of bought more CDs or mp3s online. So its true that it is truely the fans themselves that are in control of the situation. And if those fans dont all go out and by concert tickets, then they truely are the ones screwing the musicians over