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Recently in Salon Technology

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That may seem to most of us today like common sense, a law of nature, but in fact it is a concept of relatively recent historical vintage. In popular music, the notion of a class of professional songwriters and musicians who might support themselves -- and just maybe get rich -- through their music is not much more than a century old.

Scott Rosenberg + Biography + Archives

New technologies -- first sheet music, then radio and the phonograph -- made pop-music professionalism possible. So suggesting that other new technologies might change the landscape again isn't, as the indignant artists would have it, a violation of their rights or a fundamental upending of the moral order; it is merely observation of a historical process at work.

Historical process is, to be sure, impersonal and uncaring, and inevitability alone doesn't render structural changes in the music business that might cut into a superstar's profit, or force the members of a marginal band to take day jobs, any less painful. When steam power drove the hand-loom weavers of pre-Victorian Britain out of business, they took to smashing machines under the banner of mythical "General Ludd"; today's recording artists, fearful of being similarly economically displaced, have taken their Luddism into the legal system, and are attempting to smash the new music machines with lawsuits.

Rather than insist that the way the music world does business today is the only way imaginable, it behooves artists to take a longer and more imaginative view. It's not as if the status quo has served them so well. Today a popular recording artist is basically a participant in a lottery, rigged by the music conglomerates, with a tiny likelihood of winning a vast fortune and overwhelmingly more likely odds of achieving only obscurity and peanuts in royalties.

Even more than the artists, the victims of this system are music fans -- who end up paying exorbitant prices for CDs to fund bloated recording-company marketing budgets. That money gets spent manufacturing a handful of superstars, leaving serious music lovers to fend for themselves in ferreting out unusual new music that the business considers too "niche-y" to be worth promoting.

This is the landscape onto which the MP3 movement and Napster have arrived -- one filled with howls of outrage from fans. Write about this subject on the Net, as I did a couple of months ago, and your e-mail will overflow with their complaints about the way things have been, and relief at the changes the new technologies portend:

• "Why should I have to pay $17 for one good song while the rest suck? Maybe it's time that the public decides what's good instead of being force-fed by the big boys."

• "I'm sick of hearing these crybaby millionaires moaning about fans ripping them off. Fans deserve it, they paid their dues. And this is ultimately about fans, isn't it? Without us, those greedy musicians don't have a dime."

• "Technological innovations give people the power to filter through the crap that the recording industry has been packaging as music in the need to satisfy contracts or to ride or create the latest hot trend."

• "People have found a way to share music and lower the expense. Let the system adjust or die. The revolution is here and I dare you to try and take it away."

Sure, the rhetoric's overheated, but remember -- these are music lovers who should be the industry's most lucrative customers, not its sloganeering adversaries. Does this sound like, in entertainment-industry parlance, a "well-served market"?

One way of looking at the music industry wars today is to see a battle between entertainment corporations, whose revenue depends on keeping intellectual property secure and costly, and new technologies that tend to unlock intellectual property and drive its price down. Note that in this picture, both artists and fans aren't the primary combatants: They are, in truth, free to choose sides.

The hordes of music listeners who have begun to violate the copyright laws en masse with Napster have made their choice. Musicians seem more divided, with the majority -- perhaps still hoping to win the superstar lottery, or unwilling to rethink the economics of their chosen career -- still leaning toward the music companies' position, and a few renegades trying to experiment with new approaches.

Next page | A road map to four different musical futures, and some bets on which one the industry will take