Free Downloads Play Sweet Music" By Janis Ian UPDATED

Free Downloads Play Sweet Music" By Janis Ian

COMMENTARY: When researching an article, I normally send e-mails to friends and acquaintances, who answer my request with opinions and anecdotes. Just when I said I was planning to fence that free Net downloads are good for the music industry and its artists, I was swamped.

I received over 300 replies--and every single one from someone legitimately in the music business.

Even more than interesting than the e-mails were the phone calls. I don't know anyone at the National University of Recording Arts & Sciences (home of the Grammy Awards), and I know Hilary Rosen (head of the Recording Industry Clan of America, or RIAA) only in passing. Yet inside 24 hours of sending my original e-mail, I'd received 2 messages from Rosen and four from NARAS, requesting that I call to "discuss the article."

Huh. Didn't know I was that widely read.

Ms. Rosen, to be fair, stressed that she was only interested in presenting RIAA'due south side of the issue, and was kind enough to send me a fair corporeality of statistics and documentation, including a number of focus group studies RIAA had run on the matter.

However, the trouble with focus groups is the same problem anthropologists have when studying peoples in the field: the moment the anthropologist's presence is known, everything changes. Hundreds of scientific studies accept shown that any experimental group wants to please the examiner. For focus groups, this is peculiarly true. Coffee and donuts are the least of the payoffs.

The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales," "ruining the music industry," and "costing you coin".

Costing me money? I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property constabulary, but I practise know ane thing. If a music industry executive claims I should concord with their agenda because information technology will make me more money, I put my manus on my wallet...and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing.

Am I suspicious of all this hysteria? You bet. Practice I remember the effect has been badly handled? Absolutely. Am I concerned about losing friends, opportunities, my 10th Grammy nomination, past publishing this article? Aye. I am. Only sometimes things are just wrong, and when they're that wrong, they take to be addressed.

The premise of all this ballyhoo is that the manufacture (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading.

Nonsense.

Permit's accept information technology from my personal experience. My site gets an boilerplate of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was running full-tilt, nosotros received near 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded Society's Kid or At Seventeen for gratuitous, so decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd establish the site), 15 bought CDs.

Not huge sales, right? No tape company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But that translates into $two,700, which is a lot of money in my volume. And that doesn't include the people who bought the CDs in stores, or came to my shows.

RIAA, NARAS and nigh of the entrenched music manufacture debate that gratuitous downloads hurt sales. More than hurt--it's destroying the industry.

Alas, the music manufacture needs no outside help to destroy itself. We're doing a very adequate job of that on our own, cheers.

The music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel abode tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, videos, MTV ("Why buy the tape when you lot tin can record information technology?") and a host of other technological advances designed to make the consumer's life easier and amend. I know because I was at that place.

The just reason they didn't react that manner publicly to the appearance of CDs was because they believed CDs were uncopyable. I was told this personally by a former head of Sony marketing, when they asked me to license Between the Lines in CD format at a reduced royalty rate. ("Considering it's a make new engineering.")

Realistically, why practise well-nigh people download music? To hear new music, and to find old, out-of-print music--not to avoid paying $five at the local used CD store, or taping it off the radio, but to hear music they tin can't find anywhere else. Face it: About people tin't afford to spend $fifteen.99 to experiment. And an awful lot of records are out of impress; I have a few myself!

Everyone is forgetting the chief style an artist becomes successful--exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, no ane buys CDs, no i enables yous to earn a living doing what yous love.

Once more, from personal experience: In 37 years every bit a recording artist, I've created 25-plus albums for major labels, and I've never received a royalty statement that didn't bear witness I owed them money. Label accounting practices are correct upward there with Enron. I make the bulk of my living from live touring, doing my own show. Live shows are pushed by my Web site, which is pushed by the live shows, and both are pushed by the availability of my music, for free, online.

Who gets injure past free downloads? Salvage a handful of super-successes like Celine Dion, none of u.s.. We only go helped.

Well-nigh consumers have no problem paying for amusement. If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this trouble seven years ago, when people similar Michael Camp were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industrywide attitude was, "It'll go away". That'southward the same attitude CBS Records had about stone 'n' roll when Mitch Miller was head of A&R. (And you wondered why they passed on The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.)

NARAS and RIAA are moaning about the little mom-and-pop stores being shoved out of business; no one worked harder to shove them out than our own industry, which greeted every new mega-music store with glee, and offered steep discounts to Target, WalMart, et al, for stocking their CDs. The Cyberspace has zip to do with store closings and lowered sales.

And for those of united states with major label contracts who want some of our music bachelor for free downloading...well, the record companies own our masters, our outtakes, even our demos, and they won't let it. Furthermore, they own our voices for the duration of the contract, and then nosotros tin can't mail service a live rails for downloading even if we want to.

If you think about it, the music manufacture should be rejoicing at this new technological advance. Hither'due south a foolproof style to deliver music to millions who might otherwise never purchase a CD in a store. The cross-marketing opportunities are unbelievable. Costs are minimal, shipping nonexistent--a staggering vehicle for higher earnings and lower costs. Instead, they're running effectually like chickens with their heads cut off, haemorrhage on anybody and making no sense.

There is goose egg evidence that material available for free online downloading is financially harming anyone. In fact, most of the hard evidence is to the contrary.

The RIAA is correct in one thing--these are times of great change in our industry. But at a time when there are arguably only 4 record labels left in America (Sony, AOL Time Warner, Universal, BMG--and where is the RICO act when we need it?), when entire genres are glorifying the gangster mentality and losing their biggest voices to violence, when executives modify positions as often as Zsa Zsa Gabor inverse clothes, and "A&R" has become a euphemism for "Absent & Redundant," nosotros have other things to worry about.

We'll plow into Microsoft if we're not careful, folks, insisting that any household wanting an extra copy for the car, the kids, or the portable CD player, has to go out and "license" multiple copies.

As artists, we have the ear of the masses. Nosotros have the trust of the masses. By speaking out in our concerts and in the printing, we can exercise a slap-up deal to dampen this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs--in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent disability to organize ourselves in order to improve our own lives--and those of our fans.

If we don't accept the reins, no one will.

Biography
Janis Ian is a multiple Grammy Award winning vocalizer and writer. She has issued seventeen albums since her debut in 1967. You lot can read a longer version of this article on her Web site.

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