Memo to the music industry: you can’t win this war. Despite all the people they’ve sued over the last few months for sharing music with others online, as this article goes to print, there are still 3,727,353 users on Kazaa alone. The number speaks for itself.
The cat and mouse game between determined students and the music industry is an old one. Music swappers would log into chat rooms and trade songs. They shut down the rooms in response. Then Napster came along and everyone was sharing music at ease. One big lawsuit later, Napster was shut down. Kazaa took its place, improving on Napster’s shortcomings. Since then the music industry has taken to a host of methods, ranging from placing fake songs on Kazaa for users to download (ever get that swishing noise in the middle of a song?) to suing 12?year-olds as fear tactics. Obviously, with over three million users on Kazaa alone, their tactics have failed.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the group spearheading these anti-piracy measures, will probably have to either sue and jail everyone they can find swapping files or somehow force Kazaa and programs like Kazaa to shut down. Will that solve the problem? Not at all.
Right now, if you are a Kazaa user, the RIAA can go to your Internet service provider with a court subpoena and get your name. (Some ISPs are fighting the RIAA over this.) However, already there are new and improved file-swapping programs which guarantee anonymity that the ISPs can’t break. These “darknets,” such as WASTE, encrypt their networks with the same technology that keeps credit card transactions private. Furthermore, these networks are especially small and hard to gain access to. Shutting down Kazaa will only spawn more of these ultra-encrypted types. And so the cat and mouse game continues.
The music industry’s solution has been to sell their wares online. This, too, will not work. Why?
First, there are too many sites with too many gimmicks and options. Some, like AOL’s Musicnet, offer services ranging from $3.99 – $17.99. Some charge by the song, like Apple’s iTunes ($.99 a pop). Aside from those two, you have Musicmatch, Rhapsody and the resurrected Napster. What that means is that you would have to sign up for at least a few of these services, pay various monthly fees and that still would not guarantee you all the songs you want.
Oh, and there’s that ever-present problem of finding those hard-to-find songs or mixes that only one person out there has. Good luck finding those. Apparently, over three million people still prefer braving the seas of Kazaa.
Surely, there must be a happy solution in which music lovers get what they want and the music industry can continue to get paid. To solve everyone’s problem, including their own, the music industry needs to join together and create one service with all of their combined music on it. They should then charge one monthly service fee for unlimited music ($5 – $15 would probably be just about right). For that fee, they could guarantee quality (no more songs with some no name DJ yelling “what’s up New York” during the chorus) and safety (no more worms or viruses) as well as have a file-swapping service to allow users to get those hard-to-find songs and remixes. Even someone as stingy as I am would pay for that.
In addition to subscription money, they could raise funds by selling advertisements on the interface. Coke would love to smear their logo over an interface reaching every household in the country. This type of a system would draw in more than just college students. As more and more households are getting DSL and other high-speed Internet connections, they will be more and more prone to paying for a legal service for unlimited music. Everyone could win — except the lawyers.
Bobak Roshan ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in international relations and political science.