 I'm listening to Bill Hicks-one of the bravest and most innovative comedians out there. Unfortunately, he's been dead for a few years now, and the few CD recordings of his live performances are hard to come by. But someone out there is broadcasting his work again, out onto the Internet for anyone to hear for free. The quality is as good as radio (and without static), and I can even ask the DJ to cue up my favorite bit from "Rant in E Minor." Illegal? Maybe…revolutionary? Definitely. As internet radio sites go up all over the Net, the music industry as we know it may already be finished.
This all happened just a few weeks ago, when Nullsoft, the makers of the popular MP3 player WINamp, released SHOUTcast. SHOUTcast is, very simply, a free program that allows anyone with a computer and an internet connection to broadcast MP3 music in real-time. MP3s are simply near-CD-quality music files that take up very little space-roughly a tenth of regular CD audio (several new formats can do even better).
This compression makes transmitting music across the internet plausible- streaming from one computer to as many more as bandwidth will allow. While similar compression programs have existed for some time, none have been this free ($0 is about as good as it gets), this easy to use, or backed by a huge net community with a dedicated libertarian bent.
Conventional commercial radio currently works on the premise of supplying millions of listeners from a single source. This model has always seemed like a pretty good deal, because after all, broadcasting, especially of copyrighted music, is costly. Only large corporations with advertising support can afford to rent out music from record companies and secure a pricey FCC license. The end result is that anyone with a radio can tune in for free, in return for being subjected to advertising for about 10% of the time. Not a bad deal.
But there are some nasty problems that come with this system. Advertising markets are generally bad news when it comes to qualitative things like art and news. They tend to encourage a focus on a single demographic's taste. This limited range tends to become omnipresent, to the exclusion of lesser known artists and differing viewpoints. The result is that too many people don't ever even realize that there's anything else out there-they form their music preferences out of a severely limited spectrum. It's a sort of natural selection at work-only the measure for success has virtually nothing to do with the music itself, just its capacity to sell unrelated products.
It's even worse for minority-themed broadcasting. Advertisers have recently admitted to setting "dictates" against selling ads to stations that reach largely African-American or Latino audiences, depriving them of crucial programming funding. The advertising industry's favorite internal slogan, recently admitted to publicly, is "give us prospects, not suspects." (As Bill Hicks used to say, "Hey, anyone here tonight in advertising or marketing? Really? Kill yourelf!")
Worst of all, thanks to deregulation, the ownership of radio stations is falling into fewer and fewer hands. And since it's cheaper to simply re-use content across every station one owns, radio content tends to homogenize. Rogue micro-broadcasters trying to buck this trend have been hunted down and usually squashed, even though their small-time, short-range operations don't actually interfere with commercial radio. Something about creative one-man operations, usually with progressive, anti-corporate politics, seem to bother the FCC (which often seems to act like a puppet of the very corporations it's supposed to be regulating). I can't imagine why either. Maybe all those masturbation jokes in Pump Up the Volume struck a nerve.
Anyway, SHOUTcast is designed to escape all this nonsense. Instead of a few huge corporate stations, SHOUTcast envisions thousands of tiny internet radio broadcasts, each specializing in its own diverse taste. With a recently released program called MP3spy, anyone can search through a constantly updated list of hundreds of online stations and their descriptions. And because (at least for the time being) only tens of people can connect to any one server at a time, interactivity with the DJ is maximized. Because it's as good as free and impossible to regulate, this model of mass music distribution is virtually unstoppable. Junior economists will of course insist that nothing is free, but consider this-in the next few years most Americans will already own or have access to a personal computer with an ASDL (or better) net connection. These computers spend most of their time and net bandwidth sitting idle, so running a radio server set to automatically broadcast a CD or MP3 tracks stored on hard-drive wouldn't even noticeably alter regular operation. All costs are already covered by the natural upkeep of the computer. Of course, someone could sell ad space on a popular site, but the point is they wouldn't really have to (it's also unlikely that advertisers would make much money buying ad time for such small audiences-not to mention that the MP3 community is rabidly anti-advertising). Labor costs? After initially setting up the server (which takes about ten minutes) it can virtually run itself- playing through set lists of songs automatically. DJ-wannabe's can interject commentary if they want, and there's even a couple full-blown radio talk shows running out there. But even for the more professional jobs, everything I've seen so far involves people who enjoy doing this immensely and believe in sharing music.
Let's recap. 1) The software costs nothing. 2) The music is whatever music you already own, borrow, or even make yourself. And 3) as soon as your station goes up, it can be publicly listed and even searched for via artist, taste, and genre on freeware browsers like MP3spy. You can talk with connected listeners, take their requests, and even search out new music for your broadcast. Instead of a few huge, monolithic broadcasts, beamed into millions of isolated homes, imagine tiny interactive communities all across the world. Does traditional radio even deserve to survive?
Legality Oh yeah…reality. The fact of the matter is that despite great potential, MP3 and Internet radio face an uphill battle for acceptance. Sticky legal and moral issues as well as billions of dollars worth of vested interests may stifle the freeware radio scene.
The bottom line is that there is no way to outlaw the production or use of MP3s. Anything you do to music in your own home is your own business-protected by "fair use" policy. Where the issue gets really murky is in the transmission of said music to others, and whether or not said music is actually copyrighted. For awhile, it looked as if, for all practical purposes, copying and trading of music it was okay as long as no money changed hands. I mean, how many cease and desist orders have you received for making tape mixes for your friends? Making MP3 mixes and sending them over the internet, however, is a little more frightening for the music industry because a single MP3 can be copied and distributed to hundreds of strangers within minutes. This sort of illegal distribution of copyrighted music isn't likely to last in anything but a covert capacity. Live bootlegs, however, are fair game, as is any music that artists choose to release for free. (Though it's not always as easy as that- several artists, from Public Enemy to Billy Idol, have attempted to do just this, but their labels, against the artists' wishes, pulled the songs off their respective sites).
A similar hazy area exists for MP3 radio: Is it legal for you to play a copyrighted song to a friend over the telephone? Probably not technically, but no one will ever be prosecuted for it. But isn't that basically the same thing as streaming the audio into their computer? Yes, but again, it's much scarier for the music industry because it has the potential to reach so many people so quickly.
The simple argument of the industry is that passing around free copies of music will hurt album sales. Maybe, but then again it may also bolster them-the same way a hit radio singles can push unknown artists into the stratosphere. It's unlikely that people will switch entirely over to using free MP3's anyway-there's still something more satisfying about buying physical copies of albums. But the industry also seems unable to even conceive of the possibility that lower album sales may be because their big ticket artists have been putting out trend-following, unambitious music that people are getting sick of. Noooo…. It's got to be bad marketing…. it's got to be those damn tape traders....
While the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has already responded by cracking down on a few major MP3 servers, the pirates keep popping back up almost as fast. And so far no action has been taken against internet radio stations. But, let's assume that the RIAA is able to quash the transfer of any copyrighted material over the internet. And lets assume that they succeed in pushing similar formats like Liquid Audio and AT&T's A2b which are encoded with special keys to prevent copying, experimentation, and distribution- all done "in the interest of the consumer." (Of course, it can be argued that all these formats really have to offer is less freedom, enforcing the usual centralized distribution control of music.)
Is this the end of MP3 trading and private Internet radio? Not by a long-shot. At the very least, artists not associated with labels will always find the medium of free distribution tempting. And anyway, the ultimate end of privately distributed internet radio is privately created content-true music for the masses. The whole idea of such populism is to wean people off corporate schlock, not promote it further. So, if the MP3 net community has come to any one conclusion, it's that pirate distribution will only hurt their cause. Most sites therefore limit themselves to "legal" free music- that which artists have okayed for either distribution or even copying (just not, and never, ever re-selling). And with digital watermark technologies starting to be put in place, MP3s will inevitably become safe for even the most tight-fisted.
So what really frightens the music industry isn't that free small timers will drive the industry's pay-by-play services out of business, but that big name artists will realize that they don't need their labels anymore. Most of the cost in the music industry is distribution-advertising, promotion to CD stores, marketing concepts, and actual mass-pressing of CDs and tapes. Artists who opt for online distribution, however, eliminate almost all of this overhead,-since they can release anything they want at any time. No pushy labels, no constraints on their artistic vision. Every cent they make they keep. The system for doing so, DAM, already exists. Of course it's hard to see most big-ticket artists backing away from their labels entirely, but there are definite innovators out there-David Bowie, for one:
"A few days ago a kid downloaded one of my songs from my Web site. He re-recorded it at home, changing the bits that he didn't like and then put up his version on his own site. The new version is written his way, with changes to the melodies and some of the lyrics and it is available as an MP3. It is unbelievable. If he can do that, imagine what can happen in the future," Bowie said. "Of course, a lot of artists are absolutely terrified by the idea, but I love it because I love process. To me, the end result is not nearly as interesting as the process of getting involved in something."
MP3spy- MP3 station browser SHOUTcast- server info and station listings MP3.com- free (and legal) music |