The recording industry has indeed suffered from declining sales over the past ten years and it may be tempting to point the blame at file sharing, yet a mistake that is commonly made is to claim that the recording industry crisis is a music industry crisis.

For example, evidence from a Dutch study by Annelies Huygen in 2009 shows the “positive effect” of illegal file sharing: people who download music illegally (aka. pirates) are more willing to pay for concerts and related music products. Huygen illustrates that the other sectors of the music industries (the artists and live music) are benefiting from illegal music.

A Pew Internet report from 2004 interviewed 2,755 musicians to get their opinion on the impact of P2P file sharing on the music industries. In the report, more than two-thirds of musicians revealed that file sharing was only a minor threat to them, or no threat at all. Within the past five years there have also been a number of bands (e.g., The National and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) whose success has been attributed to P2P file sharing.

The rock band Wilco is one of the first bands to famously benefit from P2P file sharing. In 2001 the band was dropped from the Warner subsidiary Reprise because they were unwilling to negotiate creative changes on the album. At first Reprise refused to hand over the (already recorded) album to the band unless Wilco signed a $50,000 deal to transfer the rights, but shortly after Reprise agreed to give it to Wilco for free as a peace offering. Ten years prior, being dropped from a label might have been the end of a band’s career, considering the challenges of distributing the album (among other factors). Instead of finding another distributer, Wilco gave the album away for free on their website. Within weeks Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had been downloaded by thousands of fans and was met with critical acclaim in the blogosphere. Then, in an ironic turn of events, Warner bought back the album they had given to Wilco a year earlier! Warner released the physical copy in 2002 and the album went on to sell over 590,000 units, peaking at number thirteen on the Billboard charts.

I have personally experienced some of the benefits of sharing music on P2P networks while promoting my band Dance at the Postoffice’s latest album. In July 2009 I uploaded the album to the BitTorrent sites Mininova and Waffles.fm with the hope of reaching a few new fans. The Dance at the Postoffice project had begun only six months prior to this, and admittedly we had less than one hundred fans. When the download statistics came in over the next few days I was shocked to learn that the album had 20 downloads on Waffles.fm and 450 downloads on Mininova (figure 1).

Figure 1 –Statistics documenting the first seven days of downloads for the Dance at the Postoffice album on the BitTorrent site Mininova

In that first day, Dance at the Postoffice had made it onto the front page of Mininova as a “featured torrent”. I assumed that this might have explained the large amount of downloads, but still was not totally convinced. That week I contacted Erik Dubbelboer at Mininova to find out if there was a mistake in my interpretation of these statistics, to which he replied,

Some of these are other websites who download our torrents to use on their own website. And some of these are indeed random people sampling music. Since we have a lot of visitors the chance that a random person tries out your music isn’t that small. The huge number of downloads on [sic] the first 24 hours are because your torrent was placed on top of our front page at that time.

Similarly a moderator at Waffles.fm that goes by the name “wozgo” replied,

Yes, those are all real users sampling the music. We do not download any files for backup.

One month after uploading my album to these two BitTorrent sites, Dance at the Postoffice continues to receive an average of twelve downloads per day.

The use of “illegal music” in YouTube videos has been greeted with mixed reactions from the record labels. In 2008 Warner Music pulled hundreds of thousands of videos from the site that they believed weren’t fairly compensating their artists. Removing connectivity is usually problematic (as was shown in the last section in regard to content filtering at the level of the ISP). Ultimately it does little to benefit the artists, and in some cases can harm musicians. For example, one negative side effect of the Warner Music takedown is that some Warner Music artists that have embedded YouTube videos on their own sites now display black boxes that read, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG” (figure 2, figure 3). This connection failure not only cuts the flow of information between Warner Music artists and their fans, but it disrupts the level of continuity between the two, thus diminishing the Romantic author role by revealing industry-driven control.

Figure 2 – Death Cab For Cutie’s website displaying the Warner Music takedown notice for their own music

Figure 3 – Eisley’s website displaying the Warner Music takedown notice for their own music

While Warner Music has chosen to take down videos from YouTube, most other labels display indifference to the threat of YouTube. This is fortunate for Jive Records’ artist Chris Brown, who benefited in 2009 when his song “Forever” was used as background music in the YouTube hit “JK Wedding Entrance”. Within five days after the video was posted it became the most popular clip on the Internet, according to Nielsen’s BlogPulse, quickly passing 10 million views. Despite Brown’s song “Forever” having been released a year prior, it returned to the iTunes Top 10 list shortly after the release of “JK Wedding Entrance”.

Acknowledging illegal music as part of the music industries
Until file sharing is decriminalized, “illegal music” should be included as a component part of the music industries. To acknowledge illegal music within the analysis of the music industries does not excuse or condemn the act. Rather, it focuses on how illegal music is displacing profit and power within the music industries and creating effects that can be seen as positive.

The Australian government’s framework of the music sectors is rare in that it includes “illegal downloads” as a sub-sector of the music industries. The official document from the Music Council of Australia does not provide a detailed justification for the decision, but simply mentions that illegal downloads are important to include because “the record companies…are under increasing threat from piracy”.

Additional reasoning for why acknowledging illegal downloading should be included as a part of the music industries’ strategy is that websites are profiting immensely from illegal content:

• The Pirate Bay claims to be “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” with over 3 million users. Despite prosecution against four members in April 2009, the site still operates legally under Swedish law and generates about $780,000 annually from advertisements.
• According to the Dutch recording association BREIN, 92% of torrents on the BitTorrent site Mininova point to illegal content. Nonetheless, Mininova operates as a legitimate, tax-paying business in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and earned 1,037,560€ ($1,460,676) in 2007.
• Tens of thousands of YouTube videos violate copyright law, nonetheless the company remains extremely profitable and is worth billions of dollars.

Record labels experiencing a decline in growth need not look further than the illegal content sites and P2P services that are cutting into their profits. Nonetheless, while album sales have slowed over the past decade record labels are still generating enough cash to remain profitable. For example, in 2008 Warner Music brought in $878 million in revenue and the company’s net income surged 20%. This is more evidence of the “hybrid economy” that Lawrence Lessig argues for in his book Remix:

Work successfully licensed in a commercial economy can also be freely available in a sharing economy. If this weren’t true, then there would be no commercial record industry at all: despite the war on file sharing, practically every bit of commercially available music is also available illegally on p2p networks […] Yet despite this massive sharing, according to the recording industry’s own statistics, sales of music have declined by 21 percent. If parallel economies were not possible, that 21 percent would be 100 percent.

Illegal content continues to augment and influence various sectors of the music industries. Therefore, it should be included as a component part even though the recording companies themselves have failed to take advantage of this dynamic market.

Final thoughts
After a decade of unsuccessful battles against piracy, the decriminalization of file sharing is a must. Of the millions of dollars collected by the RIAA against illegal file sharers, none of this money has trickled down to the artists. The war on piracy does not get musicians paid. The more important (though less often discussed) question in the recording industry should be: how are musicians going to be compensated for their work?

Sub Pop is giving away a bunch of its songs as MP3s. The download page they created for it is funny a take-off on 1996-era Web design, with lots of animated gifs and nauseous backgrounds.

http://www.subpop.com/cybersex

South by Southwest (SXSW), one of the largest and coolest Music/Interactive/Film conferences in the world, is about to start up again in Austin, TX later this week. Hundreds of bands from around the world will showcase their music on over eighty stages.

In an effort to promote new music, each year MP3’s from artists that are scheduled to play SXSW are made available on the SXSW website.

The past few years Greg Hewgill collected the MP3s and released them via a torrent on his site. For 2009 Ben Stolt did the same thing: all 1267MP3 files (6.15GB) of music are available in three torrents posted on his site.

As digital audio files continue to flow freely on the Internet, music itself mimics certain inherent characteristics of the web best understood through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (D&G) rhizome metaphor. In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G introduce the concept of a “rhizome” to describe a representative model that extends in all directions and has multiple entryways; since then it has most commonly been used as a metaphor to represent the Internet. Understanding digital music as rhizomatic is important because it interprets the transformations of the digital music culture as a natural progression towards rhizomatic qualities – and provides us with an insight into what might be the future of “the music industry”.

A few of the defining characteristics of the rhizome are connectivity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and cartography. Music can be understood as rhizomatic when its characteristics mimic those of the rhizome; thus music becomes more rhizomatic when those characteristics are amplified. According to D&G, any point of a rhizome “can and must be connected to anything other”. So we might think of anything that blocks connectivity as a contributing factor in making something less rhizomatic. Firewalls and 404-errors are just two examples of obstacles that fulfill this role. Digital music is also subject to a large set of infringing obstacles, some of which include DRM, other restrictions due to copyright laws, and pay-only access for downloads. As we see these barriers disappear, we also see digital music becoming more rhizomatic.

While highlighting the defining characteristics of the rhizome…
I’ve suggested 5 examples illustrating how music has become more rhizomatic:

1) Music search engines

Over the past few years we’ve seen music search engines like seeqpod and skreemr increase our level of connectivity to music. These sites crawl the web for music and provide links to the MP3s they find. Songza is a music search engine that goes as far as to search YouTube and strip out the audio tracks from uploaded videos. Music search engines look for data already present on the network and create new lines of access. If we think of the Internet as a large map, then by uploading music to the web we extend the map; and by using music search engines we create more connectivity. And because on the web music is “unbundled” from the album, we are free to connect directly to the music that interests us the most and ignore everything else.

2) Music Is Becoming Free

The price of music continues to approach zero. This theory is supported by Michael Arrington in his post “The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free”, as well as by Seth Godin, British economist Will Page and myself on musicNeutral (to name a few). As music moves towards free, the pay-to-download price barrier is eroded, fostering greater connectivity between users and musicians.

3) The Persistence of File Sharing

The persistence of file sharing spreads more music around the web, thereby extending the territory of the rhizome. According to D&G: “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.” This trait is defined as “asignifying ruptures”, and it is exemplified in the persistence of music file-sharing sites. When one file-sharing site is shut down, two more turn up to replace it. The RIAA may have helped shut down popular music file sharing sites like Napster and Oink, but ultimately they can’t shut down P2P and BitTorrent technology.

The characteristic of cartography is also present in the spread of music files online. We can draw a parallel of music “leaking” on the Internet to D&G’s depiction of the rhizome plant: “Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours.”  The most recent example of this phenomena is with the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon: it was mistakenly available for download on the Universal Australia site two weeks before release and since has spread around the Internet (for example, here on the pirate bay).

4) Remix Culture

D&G in their description of the rhizome state that “Music has always sent out lines of flight” and it is because of these “ruptures and proliferations “ that the musical form is “comparable to a weed, a rhizome”. The “lines of flight” may refer to the fact that a song can never be re-played exactly the same by a musician (e.g., no matter how minuscule, there will always be some variation in tempo or timbre), but in addition the lines of flight also encompass all of the derivatives. ‘Remix culture‘ is closely associated with DJs that cut-up, rearrange and sample music tracks, but it also extends to the many derivative works sung by amateurs on sites like YouTube. Remix culture thus expresses the rhizomatic qualities of heterogeneity as well as multiplicity*.

5) Songbird

The open-source music player Songbird allows you to browse the web for MP3s and download music to your local library. The remarkable thing about Songbird is the set of add-ons that instantly connect your music to relevant data called from around the web. Within the Songbird interface you can match upcoming concerts, lyrics, photos and reviews to the tracks you are listening to. Songbird’s add-ons facilitate direct connectivity and re-use of data that–in comparison–frames iTunes as a music prison.

In conclusion…the interesting thing about these five examples is that they’ve all emerged within only the past decade. Looking forward to the next ten years, musicians should embrace trends that support connectivity, heterogeneity and multiplicities if they want to stay ahead of the evolutionary curve of digital music, which in my opinion means supporting initiatives like Creative Commons and the free culture movement. Evidence has shown that digital music follows the path of least resistance – and ultimately it strives to be more like the rhizome.

*multiplicity includes not only the multiple, but also the variations of the original

Music search engines like SeeqPod, Songza and Skreemr index the web looking for music files that people have uploaded to servers. For now the search engines are free to link to infringing songs, but could these sites be shut down due to copyright infringement? Read More….