Media: Thoughts on The Future of Sharing Music

[JackSpratts]

Whether online, on wi-fi’s, on sneaker nets or on some as yet uninvented super connection, and regardless of the outcomes of any legal actions, I’ve been wondering lately what will happen to the future of sharing music. While there’s a huge amount of material available it’s not infinite. You can with some effort get to the bottom of the pile. But while to my knowledge no one has actually done this, why are so few people making the attempt? Once they’ve explored and acquired the kinds of songs they like, and the ones they didn’t know they liked before P2Ps, most people seem to be left with few reasons to keep going. Other explorations are possible - one might start sharing more for instance. Most music aficionados explore uploading at some point, leaving their systems on nearly all the time so that others can enjoy their libraries, but the personal interest in having ever more musical experiences, once a hotly motivating desire, seems to bank, cool and become less urgent when a listener is able to graze unimpeded in any direction, for any extended amount of time.

In many ways music acts like a mild drug - but with a crucial difference. Yes, it gets you high; it amplifies a mood, tempers it or redirects it. But unlike chemicals that may require users to keep upping their doses to maintain a certain level of effect, music seems to have an easier to reach plateau, and once that level of satisfaction has been attained a listener can lose interest.

This peculiarity has always been important to the music industry because it suggested that the way to keep their customers hooked was to keep them from ever arriving at that plateau in the first place because if they got there, and too often, they might lose interest. To prevent that they limited access to the content. Using high prices and catalog manipulation a company could withhold that ultimate satisfaction and in so doing influence demand. Disney has done this remarkably well with old movies. While inexpensive, films in their back catalog go into and out of production at seemingly inexplicable times, helping keep the customer off balance and insuring demand stays high and ennui low. Figure out what it is that your customer wants and then make absolutely sure they don’t get enough of it. It’s a tough balance between present profits and future sales but the industry’s been doing it for a long time and they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

For the record companies the most dangerous thing sharable content can do is saturate listeners with all the music they’d ever want to hear until their interest evaporates. Then their worst nightmare occurs; the labels find themselves face to face with people who were once steady customers but who now post things on file sharing bulletin boards like “I haven’t downloaded anything for weeks. There’s nothing that I want”. What are potential customers who don’t want your products, even if they can get your products for free? What kind of business are you in if you can’t sell anything, if there’s no demand for your service at any price? At no price?

It’s a conundrum all right. Record company inventory becomes worthless, assets are shed, divisions are cut and people let go until the business itself becomes unrecognizable; the value of the label approaches zero. It’s happening now in music and I hear the movie guys feel they might be next. I think they’re right. How did this happen?

You can’t build a business based on scarcity (like say old art or antiques or vintage cars) in a medium that’s so easily reproducible, especially when technology makes the reproduction, storage and in particular the transmission so much simpler to do with each passing week. Let’s face it, any ten year old with a PC and an internet connection is now a publisher on just about the same level as a major record company. They sell us copies of ones and zeros after all - never originals - there’s nothing tangible there, like a sweater or chair or vase and we can now do that as easily as they can. In the aggregate we can actually do it a lot better than they can. For instance, look at their attempts to “take us on”, to “flood” the P2P networks with bogus files. For all their effort what did they accomplish besides further alienating the customers who occasionally still shop in the stores? There are a few bad files out there but not many, and in no way are there enough fakes to get people to even consider for an instant that it might be better to get a song some another way. It’s just five companies doing the flooding after all, and however powerful they are they’re up against three hundred million individuals acting in concert. There isn’t much of a contest. They can create animosity by the ton but they haven’t done much damage to the people’s networks. When your stock in trade is as evanescent as a breeze, when it can’t be weighed or held or even seen, when anyone anywhere can make a million perfect copies anytime for anyone for nothing you’ve got to wonder what the hell you’re doing in that business anymore.

There are differences in mediums and different approaches to them. Not every publisher has spent 100 years removing the substrate that holds their salable information. Take the written word; books have content which still has substance. You can see it in the medium layer and the act of receiving it requires an intimate physical connection. People seem to like that. It’s a bit harder to do than listening to something, a bit more active but time and again you hear readers say they like the act of reading. They like the turn of the page, the position their body assumes in a chair, the quiet introspection the practice lends itself too. The physical connection they have with the material, quite apart from the intellectual. All of that’s been lost with records and films. Remember sitting on the floor with a stack of discs and a close and play phonograph watching them spin? Remember grooves? Remember looking at them and trying to figure out which part was the chorus and which the beat? And film - who remembers seeing a movie on actual film in a private home or at school and looking through the celluloid at the captured images, so tiny and repetitive and in line but out of synch with the mysterious, squiggly lines of the soundtrack? The feeling always present that with a little knowledge and the right materials you could make this thing too. Sometimes on a hot day friends and I would place a record player tone arm on the quiet lead out groove of an old record and laugh and scream as hard as we could and sometimes if the gods of mystery were kind the tone arm would transfer the vibration to the soft vinyl and leave a little impression for us to hear. We'd made a record! We’d connected to the medium in a tangible way. Accessible magic. To quote Roy Batty, the terminal Replicant in the movie Bladerunner, "all these things are lost in time". But not lost really. Given away. Deliberately and with great forethought and effort and purpose. Let go.

The media companies have been striving mightily for decades to divorce themselves from their media to move reproduction and distribution costs to near zero in a quest that continues today. Just last week the chairman of Sony said the day is soon coming when his corporation will send pure content to a steering device inside a consumer’s house. Nothing physical at all. Just streams flowing through the ether and landing in a machine - preferably one made by Sony - but not necessarily. Because the stream itself is what’s important, maybe it’s more important in a media executives mind than anything, and maybe that’s the problem. It may not be so simple. Maybe their customers want more of a relationship with the information. Maybe we still want to see the squiggles and feel the grooves. Maybe “phoning it in” isn’t good enough anymore. Maybe it’s like a personal relationship with a distant lover that just stops working when the phone and the emails are no longer enough - you were glad to have them for a while because it gave you something to hang onto but maybe you just need more. Maybe some important things are simply lost for good when the medium vanishes and all we’re left with is a perfect sparkling sheen of empty digits passing through our heads.

- Jack Spratts.


jackspratts@lycos.com