Opinion
 

Save the music by sharing it

Joshua Curry

Mistrust of most capitalist enterprises pervades the opinion columns of college newspapers everywhere, so why stop here? Lies and contradictions have pushed many people to take the proverbial dumpster-dive toward truth, but the truths they find aren't much different from newspaper headlines and by the time they enter idle conversation, they are usually distorted. Music follows a similar course, flowing into people's minds and creating new ideas and feelings -- many of which bear no resemblance to the original ideas behind them. The free downloading of music has become the scapegoat of a failing music industry populated by people who listen to music while hearing only the sound of cash registers.

In the early days music sharing was simple. When I was in seventh grade, my mother lashed out against my cassette tape of Nirvana's In Utero with a flagrant flail of a hammer mighty enough to make both Thor and the Federal Communication Commission proud. To be sure, if I couldn't own it, then I could download enormous "wave" files with my dial-up connection. I was sticking it to the man, as the saying goes, or the woman in this case. 

MP3s were created next, and the world went crazy for them. I spent hours searching for Steven Jesse Bernstein's creepy poetry and ska band records which would never touch a Best Buy aisle. No longer were listeners confined to radio waves. No, this vast musical landscape, made up of obscure record collections, was free for all to hear and explore.

After a few years of whiny heavy metal bands and corporate radio tycoons, shots rang out from the Recording Industry of America frontlines toward major file-sharing programs. The International Federation of Phonographic Industries followed in support when the file-sharing program Kazaa exploded on the scene. Toddlers and elderly alike were issued lawsuits for sharing copyrighted music. College kids ran for the hills, and for a couple of days, not even a tumbleweed bounced its way through the servers of Kazaa. 

Today, the war has smoldered. If Americans behave the way they're taught and run for loopholes rather than resistance, the danger of being sued can be remedied by simply not sharing anything. Most files being shared are from users outside the United States, yet Americans most likely account for the majority of music downloads in the world. 

Sure, now all that's changed is that the RIAA and big record labels are resented more so than feared. File-sharing programs such as Soulseek now offer esoteric independent and electronic music that can be downloaded with no fear of retaliation from the industry.

Harvard has been getting a lot of attention recently for its study on music sharing. Record companies claim that people circumvent buying their recordings by downloading them for free, yet Harvard's extensive study concluded that it would take 5,000 downloads to equal the loss of one CD purchase. This may imply that many people are hearing music that would not normally have made it to them. It definitely implies that the blame does not rest on file-sharing for the falling profits of the music industry. Harvard's reputation alone can't make this study a smoking gun for file-sharing advocates, but it serves as a step in the right direction. Why not attack the cheap prices of CD burners? Surely they could account for a large part of drops in record sales. 

The relationship between technology and business is a never-ending evolution. Although the music industry didn't ask for all these recent changes, business is in perpetual competition. In other words, they should stop crying and actually do something useful about it.

Curry, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at barelyafloat@hotmail.com.