LIS 5033-995 Individual Paper #2 Christine Edwards

The Impact of the Internet on the Music Industry

Many seem to think that piracy in the recording industry is a recent development. However, fairness in artists rights to their creations and the unauthorized duplication of those creations have been in legal arguments since before the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web (California Law, 1971). Perhaps online advantages have exaggerated the problem, but it did not create music pirates. The truth of this statement can be ascertained by taking a look at the recording industry, both pre- and post-Internet. The History of Music Recordings The idea that anyone could own recorded sound was far from apparent during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Cummings, 2010). Yet, today, and for the last several decades, music listeners have enjoyed this exact entertainment. The origins of recorded sound can be traced all the way back to 1877, when Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph, but it would be many more years before the demand for these

recordings would create an industry. Starting with this invention, music journeyed from wax cylinders, to LP (long playing) records, to 8-tracks, audiocassettes and finally compact discs before arriving at digitized MP3 files in the twenty-first century (Lester, 2010). Much in the way that the music container has changed, the music itself can be used to communicate a feeling of social change. Joseph Hraba illustrates this point in his comment, the music of [Woody] Guthrie represents the quintessential personal document of the transition from agrarian to industrial economy in this country. (1980). The cultural exchange of any information through speech, writing, or music has occurred on a person-to-person level since time began (Wallis, 1986). When recording industries emerged and stepped in to this process, they had to learn how to promote and market music in such a way that would encourage the use of the product and get the consumer interested enough to pay for it (Graham, 1972). The enjoyment of music was no longer free to any listening ears, but could be purchased for use in the home and played whenever one liked. The largest surge in purchasing power came with the arrival of Rock n Roll and its appeal to post-1945 adolescents (Welch, 1990). Richard Aaethrson in a review of sociology and popular music saw this era as one of the greatest upswings in the cycles of symbol production (1975). A 1990 article by Richard Welch suggests that Elvis, the Bea-

tles, and nationally recognized disc jockeys such as Allen Freed fed the pandemonium of these young music fans, which greatly effected the recording industry. Welch further reflects that independent recording studios began to sell out to larger companies, like when Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records, sold Elvis Presley to RCA for $35,000. Decisive moves like this one eventually brought the recording industry into an oligopoly of only a few firms, which remains the status of todays market (Lester, 2007). The Arrival of the Internet The development of computers, and eventually the Internet and World Wide Web, brought a new facet to the face of the recording industry. According to Robert F. Easley, it has been convincingly argued that the internet - in particular the MP3 standard - is changing the music industry. (2003). Indeed, the compact disc and MP3 file have offered new alternatives to music listeners. Music can be selectively purchased from online sources or transfered from disc to computer and then to personal players or even cell phones. The online music store iTunes is the worlds most popular digital music vendor and the iPod is the preferential player (Hoffman, 2009). This also saw the rise of online file-sharing networks such as Napster, BitTorrent, and Limewire (Hoffman, 2009). Tom McCourt argues that the development of these peer-to-peer (or P2P) exchange programs seriously threatened the livelihood of the existing recording industry (2003).

These networks also fueled the piracy issues that plague the consumers and industries in todays society. Music Piracy - Now and Then Since 1999 there has been a raging controversy surrounding the Internet-distributable MP3 music format and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is in the middle of the fight. Dana J. Parker provides this information and more in her EMedia Professional article. She takes the stand that the RIAA should embrace the new technologies and use them for their own benefit instead of fighting against them so harshly. Especially since several of the MP3 files are provided by independent artists who no longer desire to wait around for a recording contract to legitimize their music (Parker, 1999). Ten years later, in a 2009 article, Leah Hoffman agrees with Parker that the music business is struggling to adapt to a new technological era. However, Robert F. Easley believes that the threat posed by MP3 has actually provided motivation for the major record labels to learn and develop capabilities to deter the potential damage from this technology (2003). While the recording industry claims piracy against the millions of people who share files illegally over the Internet, the truth is that a majority do not view this activity as criminal (Goel, 2010). P2P activity, as mentioned earlier, has been around since time

began and even Napster, in its court case, used the defense of First Amendment protection (McCourt, 2003). Sanjay Goel and his fellow researches determined in 2010 that while the media industry perceives unauthorized file sharing as a major threat to its survival, it may not be detrimental to society as a whole. Has the recording industry not already survived every other pirate in its history? For example, sheet music producers fought against wax cylinders and player pianos with little thought for the artists/creators of the works (Cummings, 2010). The juke box companies were accused of copyright infringement as well (California Law, 1971). Even the poorest of society could get their hands on cassette players and create mixtapes in the eighties (Wallis, 1986). Indeed, Alex Cummings suggests that song and sound have sparked legal wrangling from the days of the wax cylinder to the era of the mixtape and that music offers a key barometer of changing attitudes towards property rights. (2010). He also remarks that New York was the first to pass a law against piracy and that the industry itself did not secure federal copyright protection until 1971. Speaking of the Revision Bill which provided that protection, the California Law Review expressed a desire that the bill would mark the final phase of the struggle to grant welldeserved protection to the recording industry - artists and manufacturers alike. (1971).

It is obvious, however, that this was not the final phase as much as one hurdle of many the industry managed to clear. It is possible that the poor morality and illegality of the industries themselves has hardened music consumers views towards the piracy argument. The practice of payola was made explicitly illegal in the late 1950s, but only after the industry had been paying cash into the pockets of disc jockeys for several years (Aaethrson, 1975). Jack Bishop explores this issue and others when he asks Who are the pirates? (2004). He poses that with such a history of unfairness and onesided contract negotiations with artists, greed, the lust for power, price gouging, and price fixing, the industry has worked hard to earn its unfavorable reputation. The music industry has won a small battle, though. After taking down Napster in court, the peer-to-peer exchange of audio information is now commercial by mandate (McCourt, 2003). Digital rights management is another anti-theft effort by the industry, placing blocking devices on digital products and CDs, but access control technologies have been a uniform failure in preventing piracy in general (Hoffman, 2009). The greatest fear for consumers is that continued piracy will increase prices. M.Khouja offers two options to try and prevent this outcome: create dual distribution channels or, his better offer, price digital information lower to decrease the potential for tech-savvy people to choose piracy over purchase (2009).

Conclusion The development of compressed digital formats for music files coupled with the widespread availability of high-speed Internet connections and the evolution of P2P filesharing networks has thrown the media industry into turmoil. Sanjay Goel and his fellow authors may have been correct in this statement in 2010, but the industry is adapting, as it has done in the past. Legal woes have plagued the industry and held them in litigation for years (California Law, 1971). It does not look like piracy is either a new battle for the industry nor one that will ever end. P2P subscription models like Rhapsody and Kazaa should manage to deter some of the piracy and low pricing by online vendors like iTunes and Amazon will still supply revenue for the industry (Goel, 2010).

References Aaethrson, Richard, and David Berger. 1975.Cycles in symbol production: The case of popular music. American Sociological Review 40(2): 158-173. url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2094343 Bishop, Jack. 2004. Who are the pirates? The politics of piracy, poverty, and greed in a globalized music market. Popular Music and Society 27(1): 101-106. California Law Review. 1971. Performers rights and copyright: The protection of sound recordings from modern pirates. California Law Review 59(2): 548-580. Cummings, Alex S. 2010. From monopoly to intellectual property: Music piracy and the remaking of American copyright, 1909-1971. Journal of American History 97(3): 659-681.

Easley, Robert F., John G. Michel, and Sarv Devaraj. 2003. The MP3 open standard and the music industrys response to internet piracy. Communications of the ACM 46(11): 90-96. Goel, Sanjay, Paul Miesing, and Uday Chandra. 2010. The impact of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing on the media industry. California Management Review 52(3): 6-33. Graham, Tony. 1972. The structure of the popular music industry: The filtering process by which records are preselected for public consumption. Journal of Marketing Research 9(2): 236. Hoffman, Leah. 2009. Content control. Communications of the ACM 52(6): 16-17. doi:10.1145/1516046.1516052. Hraba, Joseph, Edward Powers, William Woodman, and Martin Miller. 1980. Social change through photographs and music: A qualitative method for teaching. Qualitative Scoiology 3(2): 123-135. Kamien, Roger. 1998. Music: An Appreciation. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Khouja, M. 2009. Can piracy lead to higher prices in the music and motion picture industries? Journal of the OPerational Research Society 60(3): 372-383. Lester, June, and Wallace C. Koehler, Jr. 2007. Fundamentals of Information Studies: Understanding Information and Its Environment. New York: Neal-Schuman. McCourt, Tom, and Patrick Burkart. 2003. When creators, corporations and consumers collide: Napster and the development of on-line music distribution. Media, Culture & Society 25(3): 333-350. doi:10.1177/0163443703025003003. Parker, Dana J. 1999. The RIAA and MP3: in search of a clue. EMedia Professional 12(4): 96. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1986. Culture and the international recording industry. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3(3): 375-378.
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Welch, Richard. 1990. Rock n roll and social change. History Today 40(2): 32-40.

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