How Musicians Are Causing Copyright Law Controversy
Round One: Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails v. The Music Industry (RIAA).
And so far, the public is supporting the bands.
What’s going on with Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails?
Well Radiohead recently just did a really innovative act, they’ve taken their new album In Rainbows, and placed on their website – and you can pay any price for it! Yes, that price includes absolutely nothing -as in FREE. Yes, a free Radiohead album for download online.
I just found about a survey in the United Kingdom that said that about 33% of all the people who downloaded Radiohead’s album online did pay some money to the band, up to as much as £20 ($40 in United States Dollars). There’s even reports that one downloader purchased the album for £100 ($200 USD)!
Nine Inch Nails (NIN) seems to be following in similar suit. Trent Reznor, head of NIN, has released a statement concerning their freedom from their label contract and future musical direction concerning their Year Zero album:
“Right now nine inch nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to finally be able to have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.”
What’s the result from what Radiohead did with the free albums stunt? Did they lose money?
Initial reports are that they actually may be making the same amount of money they would have made normally, with following months possibly bringing even more of a profit! Their success with this marketing may find other bands and musicians going independent, possibly bypassing major record labels and self-release their own products. This may be the beginning of a paradigm shift for musicians and the music industry. Most musicians have grown up with the classic notion:
- Make some music.
- Grind it out for years and years at clubs and bars until a major label finds you.
- Sign with the label and give over a majority of your record sale profits to them.
- Make your money from concert sales.
This turns this on it’s head. It’s known that concert ticket prices are at an all-time high. This is due to the immense failure of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) to protect the interests of the artists. The RIAA has the major labels as their main concern. It seems that the time has come for artists to make their own way.
Are all musicians this open-minded?
Well, did you hear about the Metallica vs Napster battle a little while ago? That created huge negative backlash for the band and the repercussions are still around today.
In 2000, Metallica noticed a demo for their song “I Disappear” was floating around the Napster P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing network. After more searching, they found their entire album available for free download on Napster. Metallica filed legal action against Napster, demanded the 300,000 users with Metallica songs be banned, and they also filed legal action against Yale University, University of Southern California, and Indiana University for not doing enough to stop internet file sharing from going on in their campuses. Metallica drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich then provided a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
My band authored the music which is Napster’s lifeblood. We should decide what happens to it, not Napster — a company with no rights in our recordings, which never invested a penny in Metallica’s music or had anything to do with its creation. The choice has been taken away from us.
What about the users of Napster, the music consumers? It’s like each of them won one of those contests where you get turned loose in a store for five minutes and get to keep everything you can load into your shopping cart. With Napster, though, there’s no time limit and everyone’s a winner-except the artist. Every song by every artist is available for download at no cost and, of course, with no payment to the artist, the songwriter or the copyright holder.
If you’re not fortunate enough to own a computer, there’s only one way to assemble a music collection the equivalent of a Napster user’s: theft. Walk into a record store, grab what you want and walk out. The difference is that the familiar phrase a computer user hears, “File’s done,” is replaced by another familiar phrase-”You’re under arrest.”
This caused huge headaches for the band, as tons of parodies were produced on the internet, making fun of Metallica and “Lar$ Ulrich” and the culmination being named #17 on Blender magazine’s list of “biggest wusses in rock” for its “anti-Napster crusade”.
What gave even more ammunition to the anti-Lars Ulrich crowd is an interview where he admits to not a be a user of computers and the internet:
Everybody always attacks me on it, and I’m totally open and frank, the computer is not something that gets a lot of use in my house. The Internet is not something that I utilize very much as a tool. That’s fair enough. Now certainly I have been accused of being ignorant on certain computer things, that’s all fair enough, but once again it’s sort of sad and pathetic that it becomes the best counter argument that people come up with -how can he be against a company like Napster if he’s never been on there? It’s like, because, my fucking songs are being traded around, you know, hundreds of thousands of them a day against my free fucking will, against my wishes. I think people lose sight of that with all these arguments, all these analogies, all these things that people try to come up with and be clever.
So what’s next for the music industry?
It’s definitely going to be an interesting time in the world of copyright right and the rights of musicians to protect their creative work and interests. Will more musicians join the Radiohead side and adapt with the times? Or will more musicians join the Metallica side and attack the new wave of internet music distribution?
What do you think is the future of the music industry?
