All the big dogs of the music industry tried to bark in
unison last week, but a casual observer could be forgiven
for mistaking the result for a terrified yelp.
On June 29, the Secure Digital Music Initiative,
a consortium of 150 media and electronic companies including
music's vaunted Big Five--Sony, EMI, UMG, BMG and
Warner Brothers--announced its plans for preventing
the abject collapse of the music industry as we know it.
Let's just say that although SDMI's report undoubtedly marks
a watershed in the evolution of musical commerce, it did
not inspire me to sink my paycheck into Sony's preferred
stock.
The SDMI, under the leadership of short-fused, messiah-complex-ridden
genius Leonardo Chiariglione, aimed to solve the
existential challenge the traditional music industry faces
from the Internet. The pesky MP3
format--which Chiariglione just happened to help invent
a few years back--has pushed talk of a foundation-shaking
industrial revolution from a whisper to a roar in the past
few months. Allowing artists to put their songs online and
directly into fans' hands, MP3 has realized the long-simmering
promise of the Internet to become a gloriously rowdy artistic
free-for-all.
Unfortunately for music's heavyweights, this raises the
specter of a future in which sound addicts can hook up to
their fix for free. And unless they're greasing critics'
palms, there's nothing the majors (and most minors) hate
more than a giveaway. The amount of music available in MP3
proliferated exponentially during the early months of 1999--and
the near-euphoria with which many artists and fans viewed
the prospect of a major-label-free 21st century was hard
to ignore.
Thus the SDMI, which Big Music hoped would result in an
across-the-board agreement squaring their interests with
those of the companies that build the machines that turn
ones and zeroes into music. The next generation of stereo
equipment is already in the manufacturing pipeline, and
the music industry clearly wanted to convince the hardware
companies to build a safety net for its monopoly.
Well, as someone once sang, you can't always get what you
want. The covenant unveiled last week satisfied some of
the Big Five's demands, but also bore the stamp of a powerful
manufacturing lobby not eager to see its hardware hamstrung
just to keep other conglomerates in the black.
Essentially, the SDMI agreement calls for the creation
of an encryption system designed to prevent digital pirating
of copyrighted recordings. Special codes will allow new
equipment to recognize ripped-off versions of material scrambled
under SDMI guidelines. That's fine for the music dons, as
far as it goes, but it falls fall short of what they wanted,
which was to cripple the anarchic MP3s by mandating that
future stereo systems refuse to play non-SDMI formats.
Keep in mind, these are titans used to dictating the particulars
of who jumps and how high. But now, even as they face the
prospect of their own great unraveling, they're forced to
accede to other demands, other forces. Music companies come
out of their attempted collusion with hardware firms with
something resembling a consolation prize. They'll be able
to safeguard music to which they hold the rights, but until
they find a new trump card, their monopoly over commercial
music's means of production appears to be nearing an end.
If musicians no longer need someone to manufacture huge
volumes of CDs, records and cassettes, why should they sign
away control of their careers?
Granted, the largest music companies are all subsidiaries
of even more vast media conglomerates and thus still have
incredibly potent hype machines at their disposal. But the
proliferation of information technology also undermines
that citadel of power by making it easier for anyone to
build their own propaganda operation.
Of course, other media have been under digital siege this
decade and survived. Newspapers, magazines and books are
all still rolling off the presses, and television has taken
so readily to the existence of the Internet that the two
now look like kissin' cousins. And even now, the Sonys and
BMGs of the world are handsomely compensating an army of
very smart boys and girls to figure out how to make this
kind of peace.
Still, June 29, 1999, may have been the day when the laws
of the land changed for good and the heretofore unchallenged
alpha wolves of the industry had to learn to live with untamed
beasts of all kinds. Here's to the call of the wild.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 7, 1999
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