Sound and fury: It's war between record labels and downloading fans

The Warped Tour is a little slice of heaven for teenagers. Several dozen punk bands are crammed together for one long day, shredding eardrums with their sonic assault, and thousands of kids from all around metro Atlanta thrash and mosh and crowd-surf on an asphalt sea of litter, sweat, flesh, tattoos and black T-shirts. This is the spirit of rock 'n' roll, of instant gratification and anti-authoritarianism.

And it's that very spirit that has the entire music business shaking in its Doc Martens. Because you're hard-pressed to find a kid at Warped who isn't downloading -- illegally, for free, sometimes in massive quantities -- the very music he or she has come to glory in.

The kids of Warped make up Generation D -- for Download -- and they're part of an all-out war between the music industry and millions of its customers. Many music fans now consider it their right to download whatever they want, even if it hurts their favorite acts financially. The record labels are preparing to launch a barrage of expensive lawsuits against individual downloaders, including maybe you, your child or your neighbor, running the risk of further alienating the people who support them.

The controversy is ultimately about who controls the music -- the labels and musicians want to sell full albums on CD and won't put out singles of hit songs, and the kids want to cherry-pick just their favorite songs and not buy full albums.

When the Warped Tour festival hit Atlanta several days ago, Lynsey Wales, a 15-year-old sophomore at North Gwinnett High School, had already downloaded songs from her favorite bands using Kazaa, one of many post-Napster file-sharing programs that are the bane of the record companies.

"I don't know any people who don't download," says Lynsey, who says she downloads every day and has about 700 songs on her home computer. "What's the point of buying a CD when you just want one song?"

Backstage, Vinnie Accardi, heavily tattooed lead guitarist for the band Brand New, leans back on a sofa in a room full of cases of beer. "Kids are going crazy over it," he says. "All my friends download [stuff]. I say, 'How can you not go buy the record?' It's disheartening."

Downloading has already reshaped the music industry; the problem is that no one knows what the new shape will be quite yet -- just that the current shape is bad.

CD sales have dropped about 26 percent since 1999 (the year Napster appeared), a loss of $4.3 billion. And the most popular artists have suffered disproportionately: In 2000, the Top 10 CDs sold 60 million copies; in 2002, the Top 10 were good for only 33 million copies, a falloff of almost 50 percent.

Meanwhile, sales of blank CDs have soared -- 1.7 billion last year -- far surpassing recorded CDs.

The recording industry blames downloading and downloading only. Critics of the business say the declining sales could be due to the economy or to the lack of a major trend to drive buyers into record stores.

And the record companies themselves have contributed greatly to the problem. They stopped selling singles in an effort to force people to buy entire albums; they overpriced CDs; they couldn't organize their own legal online music services and instead simply attacked the file-sharing services -- first Napster, then Kazaa and Grokster and Morpheus and a slew of other names that are as familiar to most teenagers as the characters in "Harry Potter."

The music business apparently learned nothing from the movie industry, which sued to try to stop the VCR in the 1980s, lost the suit, but adapted and now makes huge revenue off of videotapes and DVDs.

"It's a horrible time for the record business, but it's self-brought-on," declares veteran Atlanta concert promoter Alex Cooley, who's been in the music business more than 30 years.

"I've always said the stupider you are in the record business, the higher you go," Cooley continues. "I know people who run labels, and I wouldn't let 'em wash my car."

The industry's latest tactic is filing civil suits against individual downloaders. The labels' lobbying arm, the Recording Industry Association of America, has announced that it will sue people who share copyrighted music on their computers. It's now gathering names of people with large amounts of downloaded music and plans to start the barrage of lawsuits this month or in September, says RIAA President Cary Sherman.

"The music industry has concluded the problem has gotten so big that it takes aggressive steps to deal with it," Sherman says. "Nobody likes the idea of bringing litigation, but the idea of standing by and watching your products being stolen is even worse, even at the risk of bad PR."

Chuck Morrison, owner of the independent label MoRisen Records, is a member of the RIAA and has a succinct take on the lawsuits: "That's nuts. I can't believe they would ever do that."

Believe it, says Sherman. "This is a situation where the industry sees the future as being extremely perilous unless some kind of aggressive action is taken."

The RIAA will have plenty of targets. In a 2001 poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 53 percent of American teenagers said they downloaded music regularly, and the RIAA estimates downloads at 2.6 billion per month.

When the industry killed Napster in 2001, it had about 20 million users. Today there are more than 10 times that many using similar programs worldwide. And the programs themselves have gotten harder to attack because they're much more decentralized and amorphous than Napster was. Kazaa, the most popular post-Napster program, has been downloaded more than 230 million times worldwide, is owned by a company that has no direct employees and is incorporated in the obscure Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

The RIAA hopes that some highly public court cases against individuals will discourage all of the downloading it says is hurting sales.

"It just sounds so lame," says Cooley. "They will make examples of people and try to get as much publicity as they can dragging this 18-year-old girl out of her house with her hard drive under her arm and fining her $10,000. But the problem is so much more immense than that."

"If there are more than 20 million people out there using Kazaa and the RIAA is gonna sue a thousand, your odds are better of being hit by a bus," says Eric Garland, chief executive officer of BigChampagne, a company that measures music downloading the way Nielsen measures TV watching.

"Are the kids really going to stop swapping, which is a part of their lives?" Garland asks.

"Let 'em sue me -- I'll countersue!" vows Joel Rubin, a 15-year-old at North Gwinnett High, displaying the spirit of kids who download rather than a firm grasp of legal principles.

"They can't stop it -- it'll always happen," says Eric Leffingwell, a high school senior in Forsyth County. "Besides, they've got plenty of money."

While the recording industry views downloading as immoral, many people -- from downloaders and other fans to even the musicians whom downloading hurts -- view the industry itself as venal and corrupt. Musicians take different stands on downloading -- some support it, some condemn it and some do the on-the-one-hand thing -- but it's hard to find anyone who speaks up in favor of the conglomerates that run the music business. (Five companies control about 80 percent of it.)

"Anything you can give to the industry people to stick it to them, I'm for it," declares veteran guitarist Jimmy Herring, who just played Atlanta with the Dead. But Herring won't allow his 14-year-old daughter to download music.

"The industry is sleazy," says Adrian Barrera, lead singer of Atlanta band the Hiss. Tom Petty's recent album, "The Last DJ," hammers the industry, with lyrics like "Hey, Mr. Businessman, be sure to wash your hands."

Petty is a member of the Recording Artists' Coalition, a group that agitates for better contracts, claiming that record company accounting is "intentionally fraudulent" and that labels routinely underpay royalties by 10 percent to 40 percent. Other coalition members include Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Eric Clapton, the Dixie Chicks, Madonna and the estates of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and Tupac Shakur.

Retail record stores have felt the pinch of plummeting sales. Wherehouse has filed for bankruptcy protection, and Tower Records has reportedly been on thin ice financially. Some retailers are now pushing the companies to start selling singles again.

Sales of CD singles peaked in 1997 at $440 million. But the companies were discounting them so heavily that they were losing money on some, so the entire industry basically killed off the single, and shipments fell 90 percent in two years -- at exactly the point Napster entered the picture and allowed anyone with a computer and online connection to download virtually any song.

Today, if you want that one hit you just heard on the radio -- R. Kelly's "Ignition" or 50 Cent's "In Da Club" -- you can't buy it in stores. You have to buy a full CD. But you can download it.

Young fans in particular download songs and burn their own mix CDs, full of songs from different musicians. This has caused some observers to worry that the album itself is being supplanted; teens would rather string together a bunch of different songs than listen to 15 songs in a row by the same band. It's the musical equivalent of channel surfing with a remote control -- it's more fun, for some fans, to listen to songs by 20 bands on one CD than to listen to one hour by the same artist.

"Why bother to make a whole CD?" wonders Brand New guitarist Accardi. "Maybe this will make bands more experimental -- just write two songs and throw 'em out there."

"People are voting with their dollars and saying if you're gonna release albums that aren't that great, we're just gonna download songs," says Barrera of the Hiss. "It costs a couple of dollars to put out a CD, but it [sells for] $19. It's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous" might characterize some of the tactics in the war. Companies and musicians have started posting "spoofs" to the file-sharing networks -- a file that appears to be a hit song but isn't. Madonna posted spoofs of her recent CD "American Life" that, when downloaded and played, turned out to be her saying, "What the [heck] do you think you're doing?" Some hackers responded to the challenge by attacking Madonna's Web site.

The one bright spot in the industry this year has been the success of Apple's iTunes Web site, where fans can download hundreds of thousands of songs, legally, for 99 cents each. Since its debut in April, it has sold more than 6.5 million songs.

It's accessible to only about 3 percent of music fans -- you have to use a Macintosh computer running an OS X operating system. That may change toward the end of the year, as Apple tries to roll out a system that works on Microsoft's Windows system, which would bring easy, cheap, legal downloading to tens of millions, many of whom are now downloading illegally.

But even the success of iTunes reflects badly on the labels, because a company outside the industry, Apple, was able to do what the labels could not: launch an online music store that fans flocked to.

"Let's get freakin' Bill Gates in here!" jokes Jaret Reddick, lead singer of the rock group Bowling for Soup.

There is little doubt that music distribution will eventually evolve into an online business, just as it evolved from vinyl records to cassette tapes to compact discs. What's unclear is how much of the online future will be legal and how much illegal. Even as the RIAA tries to shut down people using Kazaa and Morpheus, new generations of file-sharing programs that would mask users' identities are being developed.

As Chuck Comeau, drummer for the group Simple Plan, put it backstage at Warped: "Technology will always be faster than lawyers."

"I've always said the stupider you are in the record business, the higher you go," [music promoter Alex] Cooley continues. "I know people who run labels, and I wouldn't let 'em wash my car." ...

As Chuck Comeau, drummer for the group Simple Plan, put it backstage at Warped: "Technology will always be faster than lawyers."

Good article, thanks for posting it, it's really the best I've read on this subject. They WERE fools to stop making singles, I didn't even realize this had happened. Oh, I thought those "single" cd's were sort of silly, but you know, I wasn't a teenager at the time. I guess neither were the people working in the record industry. Teenagers like to buy silly stuff, as long as it's cheap.

What made me hate the recording business was the move to tape in the 70s-80s. Those commercial tapes were crap, you were MUCH better off buying a blank tape and making a recording yourself from records. The pre-made ones failed regularly, the media obviously wasn't as good as the ones sold blank. This is really a group that should be asking "Why do they hate us?"

We made the kid disable the uploads, I sincerely hope this lawsuit thing blows up in their face, but in these new fascist days I'm not so sure it will. But the drummer is right, technology WILL always be faster than lawyers. I guess that's why they call them ambulence "chasers".

Hell, I didn't even know that the single had been given the axe.

There are still some around, just not very many. Right after the American Idol finals, they put out Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken CD singles.

But in any case, this article glosses over - hell, it IGNORES - the elephant in the living room: Most current rock and pop SUCKS. I don't just not want to pay $19 for the CD, I don't want to pay $2 for the single. I don't want the music AT ALL, not even for free. Back in the 80s when I was a teen, I didn't see a lot of kids my age going out of their way to get their hands on music from the 50s, 60s and 70s. (Yes, there were some that, but not a lot.) But today, millions upon millions of teenagers chase after 80s music online like crazy, because corporate pop and rock (and rap/hip-hop) has never been as generic and homogenous as it is today. Everyone in each genre looks the same, sounds the same, acts the same, dresses the same. (Ooh, look, another rap video where chicks are shaking their booties into fisheye lenses while the rappers - all dressed up like pimps - are drinking Courvoisier! Why didn't I think of that?!?) You have to dig deep to find anything that sounds truly fun and original.

I've gone into deep detail in other threads in the past as to why I think this is (one word: SoundScan), but until the record companies decide to start emphasizing originality over the inventory numbers SoundScan spits out every week (hint to record companies: Being #1 doesn't mean all that much when the #1 record is only selling half as many copies as the less-accurately-repored "#1 record" was twenty years ago), they're going to continue losing customers, even if they manage to completely smash all P2P activity, which of course they won't.

People, even teens, will pay for GOOD music. For subpar music, they'll only download it. If it has no value to them, they're not going to give a damn whether a record company tries to claim it does.

Heard on the radio today that Korn is selling their new "single" online for 99Cents from their website. I don't particularly like Korn, but it showed me that some ofthe bands of today are starting to shrug the record industry if their big enough..

Not quite. Here's where you get taken if you try to buy that 99¢ song.

(Ah, Mac not supported? Well, Gnutella supports Mac! Sorry Sony, guess you don't get your 99¢ from me!)

Check out MP3.com.

They have a wide genre list, links to artists, and much of their music can be downloaded for free.
Like you, my musical tastes tend to be more traditional, and I like bluegrass, ethnic, classical, blues, jazz, country western, (more western than country) and even some alternative /new age sort of stuff.
You won't always find the "big" name artists, but there's still enough unknown artists with great talent, that I don't mind.
Most of the big names only put out one or two really classic musical pieces every 5 years anyway. Who needs it?

Great article, thanks!

I stopped buying CD's when the RIAA was found guilty of price fixing... I read up on the industry at that point and found out how rotten the labels really were. They scream that the poor "artists" are being stolen from by downloaders, but the labels have been massively screwing the artists since the very beginning. Adding price fixing into that mix and I felt that the labels were simply the slimiest type of middleman stealing from both sides - the artists and customers. Now that the Internet has made that middleman completely unnecessary, I can't wait to see them disappear someday :-)

I'm surprised that it isn't more commonly understood that the end-game for the RIAA and the Record Companies is not stopping the downloading of music, but to crush the Independent Labels, and their by-passing of the old system of distribution. Think about it. Sure, they view downloading and file-sharing as a threat, but they also are enraged by the small labels who bypass the distribution machine and go directly to the people, in person and via the Internet.

The other side of the coin is that there is so much sub-standard music out there now because it doesn't get weeded out by the distribution system, the A&R departments of the major labels, and the radio stations. It has become very easy to record, master, burn to CD, and market any old junk. The technology is cheap, readily available, and not hard to learn. It's the "dumbing down" of the music industry. No wonder the major labels are in a snit!

This, too, is the major labels' fault. Nobody's buying the homemade CDs of garage bands and self-made "techno" artists in any measurable quantities, just like they didn't in prior decades when bad artists could get 500 records (or CDs) pressed for $1000 or so and hand them out to friends and beg local radio DJs to play them. It is precisely the distribution system, the A&R departments of the major labels, and the radio stations that are producing and promoting the substandard, dumbed-down pop/rock/rap of today. And there's only a certain number of people - almost all of them teens, of course - stupid enough to buy into it when all it takes it one flip to a station that plays any music more than seven or eight years old for them to realize that what they're being peddled today is CRAP. Ergo, sales are down, and will continue dropping.

And there isn't going to be ANY new "trend" or "sound" that's going to come along to save them. The labels' SoundScan-Über-Alles attitude insures that all new sounds are instantly crushed before anybody even hears about them; as long as the latest dull hip-hop album (that sounds exactly the same as every other hip-hop album in the last two to three years, minimum) sells more copies than the album representing the new "trend" or "sound," then the hip-hop record will get all the marketing and promotion.

The only hope for the record companies is for them to start actively seeking out and pushing truly original bands and original sounds. Most of them will fail, but so do most bands and artists following the tried-and-true-screw-you formats of today. But the ones that do succeed, consumers will actually become interested in, and will start supporting ... with real money.

Until and unless that day comes, the labels are digging their own graves. And their RIAA tactics are but a tiny piece of the reason why.

You are on the right track. The issue is larger than what everyone is discussing. These lawsuits are just the beginning of a long process that ends with the demise of the RIAA and the major labels.

Once upon a time recording music was very expensive and very difficult. You needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and facilities to get a really good recording. Nowadays you can record a very decent album with a total budget of a few thousand dollars.

But wait, it gets much worse than that. What do you do with your shiny new album once it is recorded and you've made a few copies? How do you get it out into the hands of the general public? Once upon a time it was very difficult to do that, you needed to have a relationship with multiple distributers and retailers in order to be able to move your product. Now you just upload your song onto the Internet, and within a few moments your song is being listened to by people on the other side of the planet. Sign on with someone like CD Baby and your songs are now available on Apple's iMusic site. And anyone can sign on with CD Baby, it only takes a few bucks and you're on your way.

Hmmmm, let's see. Need for expensive recording facilities gone. Need for elaborate distribution and retail effort gone. Next step: Major labels gone. Disappeared, just like the Dodo bird.

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