Monday, 23-Oct-2000 12:49:01 EDT
Artists Against Piracy: Whose Music Is It, Anyway?
Napster, MP3, RIAA...times are changing. What does this mean for those who generate the goods, as apposed to the means of transmission?

By Adrian Zupp, Online Editor

May you live in interesting times.

So goes the old Chinese proverb. And how well it could be applied to the music world in this hyper-hyped new millennium. Change is swirling all about us. Digital piracy, RIAA backlashes, outspoken metal drummers, litigation up the ying-yang, endless technical possibilities, excitement, cynicism. And so it goes. The times they are a-ch-ch-ch-changin’ at the speed of bytes. But what does it all mean for those who generate the goods, as opposed to the means of transmission? ’Tis high time we heard from the artists. Onward.

"In the end, the consensus among artists is about control, opportunity, and empowerment— whether the 'opposing force' is Napster or the record labels."

“There’s certainly a lot of excitement about the possibilities the Internet presents and all artists are really hoping that it will be their salvation, so to speak.” That’s the word from Noah Stone, the director of Artists Against Piracy, a coalition of artists devoted to chopping down all free file-sharing outfits. It boasts signatories from Elton John, Alanis Morissette, and Chritstina Aguilera, all the way down to acts you may never have heard of. Noah is, you might say, Shawn Fanning’s nemesis. But he certainly doesn’t see the Internet itself as the enemy of the artist.

“If we can get to a place where the Internet becomes a true alternative marketplace, where the independent artists can actually reach their fans directly, where the name-brand artists, who are in a position of renegotiating their contracts with their labels could conceivably go out and do it on their own, then finally there will be some leverage to negotiate better deals with the labels,” he continues.

Like most people in the music industry who have something to say about music on the Internet (and who doesn’t?), Stone sees it as the conduit of the future—for established artists and up-and-comers alike. After awhile, you get the impression that, at least from the artists’ side of the fence, there isn’t really a civil war going on after all. But there is a distinct wariness, as well as an underlying angst. The key word that keeps coming up again and again, like the sticking point in a crucial international treaty, is “control.”

Rising band Fisher is the prototypical cyber music success story—and they’re perfectly positioned to see the issue of downloadable music from virtually every perspective. As an unknown, unsigned band back in early 1998, the cut “Breakable” made it onto the soundtrack for the film Great Expectations. International press and Liltih Fair tours followed, but a record deal didn’t. So the band went ahead and cut their own CD and began uploading it onto a variety of sites. In next to no time they were getting 3000 downloads a day at MP3.com and had the site’s number one song for 10 months. NBC Nightly News and Time magazine covered the band, and their downloads topped the million mark. Eventually, persistence paid off and a deal was struck with Farmclub and Interscope. An album is pending.

“When we got in, it was the perfect moment,” says keyboardist Ron Wasserman. “Now it’s more difficult than ever and we get emails from people every day saying ‘What’s the secret?’ And the answer is, there just simply isn’t any.”

Perhaps there’s no secret, but the cat, as it were, is well and truly out of the bag—and the labels have seen the light. Wasserman recalls Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman saying, “We should really look into this Internet thing because bands are marketing without spending a cent. And if they’re doing it well, maybe there’s something there.

This is a trend not lost on Noah Stone. “I think the best thing that comes from the existence of Napster is it’s lit a fire under the music industry, a fire that says things have got to change. Change may be difficult but, in the long run, I’m sure it’ll be a good thing. What we’re trying to do with this organization is make sure that change happens in such a way that it gives artists a better shot rather than a more difficult one.”

For Fisher’s Wasserman, like so many other artists, that old “c” word is the key. “My thinking hasn’t changed,” he insists. “We still have 100 percent control of all online activities.” And yet he has some sympathy for the so-called “pirates.” “I don’t think these people doing this are really being malicious. They just don’t understand. Everyone thinks that the moment the artist signs with the label you get a check for a million, you sell some records, and you get another couple of million and maybe a house. They don’t understand that your livelihood comes from the sale and a percentage of the royalties. If people were educated I don’t they’d do it as much.”

Patrice Pike of Texas-based alternative band Sister 7 is not quite so forgiving. “It’s really simple: You write songs, you record them, you have a certain amount of control about how they’re recorded, and it’s a really simple obvious consideration. All the artists that are very upset—not just about Napster but other things—are concerned that there’s no controlling factor.

“We give away many, many, many tracks of live music from Sister 7 concerts,” she continues. “It’s free. But we don’t allow people to download music off our new record for obvious reasons. When you’re talking about selling a difference of between 50,000 and 200,000 records because of the Internet, that can really make a difference for us in our careers monetarily and how we are perceived by our labels. The Internet was a very important tool for us, especially in regard to our fans. In other parts of the world where our record is still not released, we get emails from people—in Brazil, Germany, Japan, Australia—who write and say ‘Thanks for putting your music up on the Internet so I can download it, because we can’t get your record over here right now.”

The hyperbolically named (and more established) Presidents of the United States of America—a post-grunge Seattle outfit hat has a comedic slant to its repertoire—shares Pike’s sentiments. “My attitude is that anything that allows the artist more direct access to someone who wants to buy their record or buy a song or buy their merchandise or support them in any way, is a good thing inherently,” says founding member Dave Dederer. “All these crazy complications that we’re dealing with—MP3.com, Napster, and so forth—they’re all just part of the process. I’m willing to live with the problems because I like the fact that it’s kind of out of control. The record industry for the last 20 years has been a little too under control, from what I can tell. A little limited. Most of the records that are sold are sold through an extremely structured, not very flexible system of selection and distribution. And I think that the advent of all these online possibilities is the light at the end of the tunnel. It can only be a good thing.

“I’d have to say digital music has been a positive for us because this company that we’re putting a record out with, Musicblitz.com, would not have started up if it weren’t for the viability of downloadable music,” Dederer continues, “We’re putting out a record with them and 99.9 percent of our sales will be hard copies sold in the retail stores. The fact that they exist as an independent company and they have the capital and the desire to do something like this, is really a product of the advent of online music. If we had had to sign a major label deal, we wouldn’t have made a new record.”

For all his positivism and budding anarchism, Dederer still falls in behind his cautious peers. “I’m against piracy, no doubt. If my music is available in a standard format and can be purchased readily, either through a retail or online source, I would like to be paid. That’s kind of a no-brainer. It’s stealing.”

In The Locker Room
Doug Camplejohn is the founder, president, and CEO of Myplay.com, a site that allows members to accumulate and share downloaded music in their personal online “lockers.” He raises the point that, in popular music, the “middle class” of artists has all but disappeared and the Internet may be the key to its revival. “The challenge is marketing costs. If I want to be a breakthrough artist, I really need to spend millions of dollars on radio play, MTV and VH1, touring, and all the promotional stuff that happens. And that happens not just for an up-and-coming artist, but for the big artists as well. By targeting consumers on the Net, the whole process can be more cost-effective for artists who might sell 50,000 to 150,000 CDs.”

In the end, the consensus among artists is about control, opportunity, and empowerment—whether the “opposing force” is Napster or the record labels. But one tangential issue—one important potential phenomenon—has gone virtually unnoticed throughout the rise of digital music: album cuts. If the heavy emphasis among downloaders thus far has been on high-profile songs, that is to say singles, are all those great, less “hooky” tracks that have always filled out albums going to become a thing of the past?

“Remember, singles were part of the business, but that’s been gone since the advent of the CD,” says Noah Stone. “The obvious hope of MP3 technology is that singles can be sold on the Internet at a very reasonable price. There are artists who would benefit extremely from a singles market, and we need to find one on the Internet—that is a real hope. We can’t abandon the album format; we just need to have the option to have a single format as well.”

Sister 7’s Patrice Pike observes that the hit mentality is alive and well which, she says, is unfortunate, because radio and other singles-oriented media miss the breadth and depth of an album. “The bottom line is, radio is extremely formatic,” she explains. “Radio and MTV and VH1 are all about ‘a song.’ And until you get deep into a record, the masses aren’t really being exposed. They do buy records based on one or two singles that they hear… so the time of album-oriented music has passed and hopefully will come back.”

President Dave Dederer concurs, suggesting that—at least for the foreseeable Internet future—the album experience may be near extinction. “There’s strictly the possibility that, in five or 10 years, people will be buying singles online, some way or another. The whole idea of the album could easily disappear within the next 10 years.”

Not so fast, cautions Doug Camplejohn: “Consumers have shown that if there’s an album and they’re forced to pay $16 when they really just want a song or two, giving them the option to only pay for the music they really want will allow them to get that.” Camplejohn says that the ability to sample lots of music via Napster-like services might allow people to try a lot of things before they buy, as well as give artist the flexibility to package their music as they want to package it.

It should always be remembered that the artist is the first link in the food chain. Without them, nobody gets fed. And what they do has a unique value to them. To quote the slogan on the Artists Against Piracy website home page: “If a song means a lot to you, imagine what it means to us.”