Guest Column
November 22, 2000
Artist Survival & the Internet
A vision of empowerment for musicians in the file-sharing era
by Don Joyce
The Internet was designed during the dark days of the Cold War by government scientists and engineers who thought it might save our lives some day by facilitating the exchange of defense information. They made sure this new medium would be immune from any central control point that might be compromised or from any lockout mechanisms that might hinder communicating within it.
Fueled as it was by paranoia, it is ironic how much paranoia the Internet is now causing -- not on the part of our military/industrial complex, but on the part of our corporate capitalist complex, who see this medium as prey for commercial colonization.
Any user's ability to subvert "gate keeping" makes the Internet quite unlike other mass media. Our once public airwaves have turned audiences into passive sponges through one-way sponsor messages. But Internet users are participants in a new arena, able to interact with pure ideas and information, to take in or pass by or pass on as we choose, uninterrupted by ulterior motives and uncluttered with "deals" or conditions.
Music, for instance, is suddenly being treated as if no one owns it at all. It's as appreciated and sought after as ever, but with no apparent need to compensate its makers or its owners. This realm of free exchange threatens all the control mechanisms that define music as a finite commodity subject to the laws of physical supply and payer demand. On the Internet, demand takes whatever it wants because the free copies are virtually infinite, copyrighted or not.
Music "piracy" on the Net has never been hindered by users' respect for the record industry -- because there isn't any. The labels' long history of greed, their absurdly unfair and deceitful contracts, their price inflation and price fixing, their virtual economic enslavement of artists, and their frequent connections to organized crime, form a history of such disgust that any so-called Internet piracy pales by comparison. It becomes easy to "steal" -- or, if you prefer, "copy." Now that there is an actual alternative to the labels' distribution monopoly, the trashing has begun with vengeance.
These developments have baffled the labels. They continue to look at the Net as another shopping mall, where they must control access to their product in order to maintain economic control. They seem unable to rethink the nature of their product once it leaves the hard-goods world of per-unit compensation and enters the digital world of immaterial and infinite proliferation. Nothing changes hands on the Net except ones and zeros, and they are not in limited supply. Neither is one person's particular array of ones and zeros diminished when another duplicates them. (This immateriality of Net content actually mirrors the musical experience itself -- which is, ultimately, just waves vibrating air, whether from speaker cones or instruments.)
Next Page: Copyright vs. the Net; The Empowered Artist....
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Don Joyce is a member of the collage music band Negativland, who have been considering the fate of music under law since a piece of theirs precipitated a suit for music copyright infringement in 1991. Negativland will soon make all of its music available as free downloads on their Web site, www.negativland.com.
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