Hail to the Thief, Indeed...

What I need is a good defense/'Cause I'm feelin' like a criminal

- Fiona Apple, "Criminal

Way back when, when Roger Mexico still lived a few blocks from my apartment, we used to spend a lot of time playing on the Internet. I had no computer at home, so looking up weird websites was a novelty to me. But every night pretty much ended up in the same way: he would set the computer to download a few songs he'd sought out on Napster, and we'd go do something else. (I later entitled a CD of songs that he burned from these late night pursuits 3 a.m. Napster Whore and decorated the cover with quotes related to his late night piracies.)

Given the fact that my computer and my dialup connection were too slow for effectively joining the peer-to-peer filesharing fun, I kind of missed the Napster revolution. In fact, the only downloading that I've done has been perfectly legal. After listening to a friend's streaming DJ gig in the chat room he frequented and bitching about the fact that he played the same songs every single week, I set out to prove that I could find two hours of new and interesting music, download it and burn it to CD in one evening. (I was using Zappagirl's Mac, so the dialup situation wasn't a issue.) A little more than two hours later, I had two brand new mix CDs full of bands that I'd never heard of, bands that I new very little about, and band that I liked that had made live versions of songs available to the public.

Flash forward to the present day. I now have a nifty somewhat-new laptop (complete with a CD burner), a DSL connection, and a spindle of blank recordable CDs. And rather than seeking out new music via Kazaa or some other fileswap service, I'm busy following the ensuing battles between the RIAA and the downloading public. Well, that and getting angrier by the second about what I see.

Yes, I realize that there are people out there that are abusing the system. There are probably people out there that are downloading everything they can get their virtual hands on, gloating about the fact that they haven't purchased a CD in the last three years and have thousands and thousands of songs stored on their hard drive. But for every one of those people, there are scores of Regular Joe Downloaders. Regular Joe Downloader isn't interested in intentionally screwing the RIAA. He just doesn't see the point in paying $17.99 for a CD that contains one song that he wants. He was on a message board last week, and he heard about a band that doesn't get any airplay on ClearChannel-owned radio stations. He'd like to find out if he likes this band without playing Russian Roulette at his local record store. He knows the name of a song that he heard in a club last weekend, but there are five different bands with a song by that title, and he doesn't know which song is the one he likes. He'd like to replace that CD that he lost when his car got totaled last month, but can't because Athens, GA Inside/Out has been out of print for some time now.

Regular Joe Downloader is using the system for all the right reasons. But because of Smug Bastard Downloader, Joe can't use the system without being considered a criminal and facing a lawsuit.

The RIAA has loudly proclaimed for some time now that they are fighting the filesharing system on behalf of the recording artists. Free sharing of music means that while the music is being traded and listened to around the world, the person who made the music doesn't see a dime of royalty fees beyond the amount made from the initial purchase from which the first mp3 was ripped. Because the RIAA is just standing up for those poor, poor artists.
Well, with the notable exceptions of artists that sell millions and millions of albums, the royalties don't add up to instant money in the bank. And frankly, the labels aren't all that concerned with artists that don't sell millions and millions of albums. Consider the fact that Karin and Linford from Over the Rhine live in my neighborhood. The band was signed to I.R.S. Records in the early 90s, and is currently recording under the Sony/Back Porch label. They're a critically acclaimed band with a small following. And they're living in a not-so-posh city outside of Cincinnati. Somehow I doubt they're living the high life.

Additionally, the albums that were released on the I.R.S. label were unavailable for quite a long time, since I.R.S. retained the rights to the recordings after dropping them (and folding shortly thereafter). But Regular Joe Downloader would still get slapped with a lawsuit if he had made anything on Eve available on a peer-to-peer network. Go figure.(Apparently, they did manage to get the rights to the albums back and are now offering them for sale on their website. Good for them!)

The RIAA is also quick to point out that downloaders are killing the music business, and point to the drastic drop in CD sales to support their claim. They seem to be unaware that the country has been in an economic downturn for several years now, and most people are more concerned with putting food on the table than buying new music. I know that I used to buy lots of music, but I've become more frugal in my purchases. I don't have as much pocket money as I used to, and I've gotten burned more than once on albums that had one song that I liked. $17.99 is an awful lot to blow on an impulse buy, especially when it's common knowledge that the production cost is considerably less than that. (We all remember that settlement that everyone was jumping on board for, right?)

Universal has taken a step in the right direction recently by lowering the price point across the board on their products, but will the other labels follow suit? Will this gesture be embraced by the buying public and result in increased sales? Time will tell.

And then there's the quality of music available today. Yes, I know I'm old, but the majority of the music that I hear on the radio these days doesn't appeal to me. (Which explains why I seldom listen to the radio, unless it's NPR. Now get off my lawn, ya damn kids.) I know that there's music beyond the Britneys and Justins and Linkin Parks and Creeds, but it's become increasingly hard to find. If Sony doesn't promote the artist and ClearChannel doesn't play it, chances are good that you won't know it exists unless you hear about it through word of mouth.

I recall when I worked for Best Buy a few years back, they had a tendency to promote the living daylights out of one artist and leave the others to their own devices. When the new Pearl Jam album came out, Sony shipped 600 copies of the new album, plus at least a hundred copies of each album and single in the back catalogue. I know this for a fact, because I single-handedly placed every price tag, sale tag, and security tag on every single CD that was shipped. (The album tanked horribly, we shipped back several hundred Pearl Jam CDs a few months later, and I've had nightmares about Eddie Vedder ever since.) They also dropped the price point on a few debut albums (Fiona Apple, eels, Primitive Radio Gods) in hopes of building a listening audience for these new artists. The results were mixed. Fiona Apple managed to do OK (but got more recognition from her anorexic underwear video), eels garnered a small following (but will probably never play sold-out stadium shows), and... Primitive Radio Gods? I only remember the name of that one song ("Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand") because of the long unwieldy title. The melody has long since slipped my mind.

But let's stop for a moment and consider eels. I didn't pick up Beautiful Freak without a listen, mainly because the album art creeped me out. I'd seen the video for "Novocaine for the Soul" and thought the song was catchy, but still wasn't ready to plunk down the money for the album. A year later, a co-worker recommended the album to me and let me borrow his copy of the CD. I bought it the next day, and it still gets heavy rotation at Chez Myo. How much sooner would I have purchased the album if I could've gone online and taken a few more songs out for a test drive? (In the same vein, where would the money that I spent on Bob Mould's Modulate have gone if I'd known ahead of time that the album - sorry, Bob! - didn't really appeal to me?)

After my little downloading experiment at Zappagirl's that night, I discovered that I like bands I'd never considered like The Sea and Cake, Air, and The Reindeer Section. My likelihood of purchasing music by these artists or buying concert tickets has now greatly increased. I look upon this as a promotional tool, but apparently the RIAA doesn't want me to discover new artists and possibly buy their music. They want me to listen to their artist du jour, and they want me to pay ridiculous prices for it. I never was one for force feeding. But if I don't follow the rules they set for me, I'm a criminal.

(Incidentally, my sister is a criminal by these standards. Hope Sydney doesn't get dragged off to jail because she downloaded that Human League song.)

In an effort to combat the free filesharing, the labels came up with their own models. Most downloaders (based on opinions voiced on various message boards that I frequent) wouldn't be adverse to paying a reasonable fee for the music that they download. However, paying a monthly fee for the service, setting unreasonable limits on how many songs one may download, and then further limiting how that download may be used by the person (inability to burn to CD or transfer to another computer or mp3 player, time limits on the song before it disappears from your computer) are deterrents to going the legal route.

I've heard tell that there are plans to make CDs unplayable on computers. How does this affect people like Roger Mexico, who uses his computer as his stereo? There was a story on the news today about "unrippable CDs." Does this mean that I cannot use my CD burner to make mix CDs for my own personal use? Have the laws of fair use been thrown out the window, like the proverbial baby with the bathwater? There are also murmurings that the recording industry will eventually release CDs that will only play on one media player, which will mean that the buyer would have to purchase a copy for the stereo, a copy for the computer room, a copy for the car stereo... look, no matter how much I like Radiohead, I am not buying four copies of Kid A.

I wish there was an easy solution to this problem. Apple seems to have hit upon a workable pay model, but I won't really be able to try it on for size until they unveil the Windows store. Some artists have music available for download to the public on their websites, some have made their songs available on sites like Amazon (although the songs there often are available in formats that are incompatible with each other... thanks, but I don't need a billion different players taking up valuable space on my hard drive). But I think that the RIAA needs to stop looking at internet music as a way to make a quick buck off the latest pop music remix available at the local Media Play, and think about ways that it could be used as a promotional tool, or ways to make out-of-print music available again. (Janis Ian thinks so, too, and is a lot more qualified than me to make statements about the way the music business works.)

Until then, I'm a lot less likely to purchase an album on a whim that will further line the RIAA's pockets. And I'll be damned if I'll ever sign the Filesharing Morality Pledge. Most likely, I'll just sit back and watch and wait for the eventual outcome, whatever it may be.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to 3 a.m. Napster Whore and reminisce, because Johnny Cash's "Cocaine Blues" rocks my world.