Musician’s Notebook

There’s one industry on earth that seeks to engage all your senses. It offers more than anyone could ever need to sate the ears; there are all kinds of glittery film clips and artsy pictures; its spokesmen pose on the labels of Pepsi bottles and various other sugar-infused tastes, and you can reach out and touch them at a live appearance, amidst the crowd jumping up and down and grinding against you.

And everyone remembers the smell of their first brand new album, the one that escapes when you open the case and turn the first page of the booklet (and it’s a much better association than mentioning the smell of sweat at a concert).

Of course, I’m talking about the music industry, and with all their fingers in dozens of pies, you’d think they’d be the first to adopt new technology, and the new cultures that form from it. The music industry is the slowest industry of the arts to move forward, and this has happened again and again over the decades, from piano rolls to vinyl to cassettes to compact discs all the way to the MP3. Not only do they resist the technology, but they resist the culture.

The music industry is starting to catch up on digital distribution, and it’s possible to find the majority of popular artists’ catalogues in iTunes or any of the other online music stores. These distributors are all struggling with the record companies who have begun the process of adopting new technology, but have not yet bothered to adopt the culture. Instead, they bring their typically capitalistic and Western attitude with them, and it seems to say something like this: guard this intellectual property obsessively with flimsy, breakable security devices, or we might lose all of our money and go out of business!

These crippled files are intended to stop piracy. Look at the internet! Piracy is still rife. Legitimate consumers are the only ones affected by this plague of DRM, and it’s such a flimsy and easily broken method of protection that it will never stop piracy, but only fan its flames on. The people who pirate an album are not the ones who would have bought it in the first place, so DRM not only cripples legitimate users, but in fact loses album sales through the growing culture of people who are opposed to purchasing albums for ethical reasons.

The digital culture, provoked into existence by these new technologies, needs an entirely different approach from the music industry to work effectively. The approach that is needed demands unprotected releases, because DRM can be broken easily, but trust is much harder to tear apart. You can go further - release some, or even all, of your songs for free download, and see how that improves your credibility and album sales.

DRM is killing sales, it’s killing artists and it’s killing consumers. If DRM doesn’t go, it will only be a matter of time before independent artists, with unprotected albums and free songs for download, are taking the big audiences, the big money, and the big satisfaction. That might not be such a bad thing, and that’s the power of the internet. The music industry has a big lesson to learn from the literary industry and its luminaries such as Cory Doctorow, where some pockets are readily adopting less restrictive policies.