mudcat.org: The revolution that Napster Started

I always enjoy those commercials on cable channels for "New Economy" companies that don't seem to have any of what we in the Old Economy call "products," but instead use words like "digital" a lot. (Sounds so last millennium now, don't you think?) Dear old Nortel was the brand leader of this game with their magnificent slogan, "What do you want the Internet to be?"

Speaking personally, I'd like it to be able to cut my hair. But I logged on to e-bangs.com, pushed my head up against the screen, waited and waited, and after 20 minutes they still hadn't downloaded my mousse. Eventually, I had to get up, leave the house, go to a salon and have my hair cut by a "snail male." Can you believe it? "What do you want the Internet to be?" Subtext: Frankly we haven't a clue. Maybe declining Internet usage in the West is a phase. Maybe one day they'll come up with something new to do on it. Maybe next time William Shatner has a hit commercial it'll be a hit product, too. Or maybe it's run up against its commercial limitations, and the only big question left is not whether Nasdaq and Nortel are in the tank permanently but how much of the Old Economy they'll take down with them.

Five years ago, a technobore chum said to me, "You old-media content providers are going to have to get used to earning much less money." Yeah, well, we old-media content providers are holding our own, pal. If it weren't for us, there'd be no readable content on the Internet at all. Those who look for news and analysis online go to the The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, even the National Post. The only "content" growth on the Internet has been in conservative American Web sites, which conveniently link beleaguered heartland Yanks groaning under East Coast network piffle to right-wing columnists like yours truly. But even that booming market is mainly an underground response to the restrictive content of TV news and mainstream newspapers like The New York Times with no conservative columnists. If every Old-Economy business enforced similar constraints, the Internet would be unstoppable. If Price Chopper refused to offer anything other than vanilla ice cream, I'd be running e-cones.com.

Still, while I like getting appreciative e-mails from Wyoming and Louisiana and Fiji, I can't quite see the commercial benefit either to me or the Post. We old-media companies have proved we can attract readers to the Web, but haven't yet figured out how to make money off it. In a way, we're doing to ourselves what Warner Bros and Sony are suing Napster for: We're giving away our copyrights.

I agree with the record companies on Napster: It's intellectual-property theft. But what the execs forget is that intellectual-property theft has been the norm for most of human history. The modern copyright era in North America dates back a mere eight decades, to another court case: On April 1, 1915, the composer Victor Herbert walked into Shanley's Broadway Restaurant and heard the ensemble playing the title song of his hit operetta, Sweethearts. He sued for payment, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled in his favour. The judgment wound up making Herbert, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and many other songwriters far wealthier than their 19th-century predecessors.

But it didn't stop there. For Herbert's generation, copyright protection was about sheet music and live performance. But the law's expansion of intellectual-property rights occurred at the beginning of an era of huge technological innovation that expanded the earning potential of a song far beyond Herbert's wildest imagination -- through the Victrola, radio, talking pictures, LPs, TV, CDs, VCRs. All these technologies were controlled by the big entertainment conglomerates. Joe Schmo could illegally perform the score of Sweethearts on his ukulele, but he lacked the means to press his own cast album or release his own movie adaptation.

The Internet's changed all that: It's slipped beyond the grasp of Sony and Warners. They can win the suit, but not the war. Internet music downloading is reckoned to have been responsible for a 39% drop in CD singles shipments in 1999. We are witnessing the end of enforceable copyright: Every man is now his own compilation album, and the songwriters of tomorrow will look less like Alanis Morrissette or Bono or Elton John, Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert -- and a lot more like Charles Twiggs, who wrote "Pop Goes The Weasel" in 1853, or J.S. Pierpont, who wrote "Jingle Bells" in 1857 -- popular songs back then and to this day, but the guys who wrote 'em never expected to be able to live off them the way, say, Trevor Nunn can live off the lyric he wrote to "Memory" from CATS.

Conversely, for other artists, technology is good news. If you buy one of those books about how to become a writer, you'll usually find an essay urging you against "vanity publishing": If it's worth publishing, they say, some professional publisher will agree to take it on. True. But whether the professional publisher knows how to handle your book is another matter. If you're just some rinky-dink name at the back of the catalogue, you're giving up most of the retail price in return for zip: no ads, no window displays, no TV interviews, no reviews in national newspapers. By contrast, most successful songwriters, from Irving Berlin to Paul Simon, are "vanity publishers": They don't just compose the songs, they own them 100%. The obvious difference is that they're not dealing in bulky products like books: It's just a question of getting a lead-sheet to the recording studio. But new technology will make self-publishing as logical a move for book writers as it was for songwriters.

In other words, the "information revolution" is coming, but not the one predicted. It's not about "convergence," but about disintegration -- about a world where a guy who writes a small book on the history of wainscotting doesn't need Random House, and a gal who wants to give her boyfriend his own CD of Your All-time Favourite Love Duets doesn't need HMV or the Virgin Megastore, and no one needs Sony or Warners. And come to that no one will need Napster or Amazon.com either: For Joe Schmo, it makes more sense to be Amazon.com than invest in it. We have arrived at the situation Marx and Engels urged upon us, where the proletariat would rise up and seize control of the means of production. Their only mistake was that they were envisioning a workers committee running the local steel mill. But the steel mills have gone, and today the biggest industry in the U.S. is entertainment. That's the one the masses are kicking down the factory gates of. When they've finished, entertainment will no longer be America's dominant industry anymore than it was in the days of blackface minstrel shows. The "New Economy" will include hairdressers and butchers and bakers and specialty candlestick makers, but not huge conglomerates getting rich off the likes of Snoop Dogg.

And, when you think about it, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys than all those record-company limousine liberals who, from Elvis to Eminem, have perpetrated the most ludicrous confidence trick of all: half a century of ruthless capitalist corporate continuity masquerading as radical, dangerous, progressive permanent revolution. In real revolutions, the stock market plummets, the currency collapses, the stores get looted and your inventory's wiped out. Hey, Mister Pony-Tailed Executive Vice-President: You say you want a revolution? Here, belatedly, it comes.

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