Dear Big Music, you are cut off - signed, college students everywhere
March 1, 2003
The Philadelphia Inquirer (Op-Ed)
Emily Brill
PHILADELPHIA _ There's a revolution afoot _ and if you're in doubt, go check out a typical college dorm. Almost all U.S. colleges and universities are now wired for high-speed Internet access, which means that students can download music files in a matter of seconds (if they couldn't already at home). According to a recent study conducted by research firm Ipsos-Reid, 28 percent of the American population 12 and older have downloaded a music file off the Internet. That translates to 60 million downloaders.
So here's a news flash for Big Music: It's over. We have cut you off, and guess what? We don't feel the least bit guilty.
Why? Because the overwhelming majority of the artists who fill our hard drives are considerably well off, as are the people and companies who manage them.
"Why should I feel guilty?" asks Princeton University freshman Molly Fay. "Most of the artists I download make more money than I ever will. Who am I to care if I cheat them out of a couple of bucks?"
But money isn't all of it. There's a big difference between stealing a hot dog from a street vendor and downloading an MP3 (a popular format for packaging and sending audio files). University of Pennsylvania freshman Malcom Dorson points out that "downloading something is way too impersonal to ever make me feel guilty." We don't have to look anyone in the eye, and when we "take" a file, we're not removing it; we're copying it.
Another reason there's no chance of us returning to the music stores: making our own CDs is just way too convenient.
"The majority of my CDs are definitely my own mixes," says University of Pennsylvania freshman Merrill McDermott, adding that since she likes a lot of different genres of music, "downloading is the only way to obtain that eclectic mix" she's after. And Merrill isn't alone. None of us want to have a decision as important as what to put on a CD made for us by a bunch of executives in a California conference room.
The Recording Industry Association of America is, of course, upset. And the organization's honchos seem to think that they're going to legislate their way out of this revolution by gaining access to private customer information held by Internet service providers. Haven't these guys heard of Web anonymizers _ sites like SilentSurf.com, Anonymizer.com, and dozens more that will likely pop up? Such sites make anyone's presence on the Internet virtually ghostlike.
We aren't revolting against the artists. We are revolting against the non-artists, the people who take art and make it fit into a Doritos commercial. For those of us who have the money, supporting the little-known groups remains an important cause.
"The only reason I would ever buy a CD," says Brown University freshman Janis Sethness, "would be to support the music groups that I like. But if a group is on and I like what I hear, I go to Kazaa, not Tower Records."
Music industry efforts to curtail our use of file-sharing programs will be futile for two reasons. First, kids are always one step ahead and can defeat almost any technology with another. Second and more important, the music industry gives us too great a reason not to buy music. They charge us $20 for albums that cost about 13 cents to make _ albums that have, perhaps, two songs we actually want. That's a whopping 15,385 percent gross profit _ and I mean gross.
New pay-per-download services _ like one now in the news for which users pay $10 a month plus 49 cents per song _ are probably still too expensive and won't work. Even if they did, it's hard to see how the music moguls would be able to keep their lifestyles on that kind of money.
Our revolution doesn't threaten the future of music. In fact, we have high hopes for what these changes could bring to our ears. University of Pennsylvania freshman Kevin Collins recently wrote in Wharton's First Call newspaper: "File sharing systems will force the resurrection of the album." Programs like Kazaa, Collins argued, will "force the artists to return to the album to sell music" instead of going on MTV to promote a single song.
Fay captures a prevailing sentiment: "If having MP3s means that some in a suit won't be able to buy that third BMW he was craving, along with the house in the Hamptons, because the rest of the population saves necessary money by not purchasing music from a store, then I'm all for it."