Oooh I forgot the Brit awards were looming,that big red carpet thang where the record companies threatening to get people locked up ten years, THAT'S TEN FRICKING YEARS!, congratulate themselves in a manner designed to sell more product during the post-crimbo sales lull. Anyhoo, you can’t seriously justify internet piracy. But, some context would be nice, that and some history of the megacorps on whose behalf tax payer funded public servants are threatening to lock ordinary punters up for 10 years *.
Starting with the history, from Brothers in Arms onwards major record companies spent over a decade profiteering from people replacing their LP collections with CDs, doing little more than sitting back and reformatting their back catalogues, all the while pissing away easy profits on “flowers'n'chocolate” and shit bands.
Of course all good things come to an end and eventually it became apparent there were only so many special, special, deluxe editions people were willing to buy before they started asking why the damn things weren’t remastered with bonus tracks in the first place. The record companies by this stage were presumably hoping for another format to emerge and it did, kind of.
Unfortunately for them it was the combination of MP3s and Napster. As a result the record company business model of the latest thing releasing one single, then another, then touring to promote an LP (auto-repeat 12-18 months later) plus ripping off punters via back catalogue CD sales started to creak. Interestingly, this business model was and is similar to pharmaceutical companies, another set of marketing and distribution machines that exploit little legal monopolies for as long as and in as many ways as possible. Anyhoo when Napster appeared the record companies responded in a predictably legalistic fashion with Lars Ulrich for some reason becoming the multi-millionaire fall guy intent on undermining any cool, hip or happening cache the recording industry had ever tried to claim.
Napster lost, the record companies won, but other methods of distributing pirated material had already appeared. The point they embodied was straightforward; record companies had repeatedly proven to be incapable of developing new business models that met emerging consumer demands because they were focused exclusively on preserving an existing one dating back to the 1960s (but not in a hippy way). In simple terms record companies were shown to be shit at business and addicted to the strategy we know and love today of using the law and lobbying to mask their failings.
And so it continued to the point where it reached ridiculous levels here when Feargal Sharkey, as the UK record industry’s spokesman, claimed publically that record company sales are a key contributor to the UK balance of trade and A&R is capital investment in a lets all borrow big boy chat and pretend Simon Cowell’s talent shows and stuff like say Sony, rather than "investing", simply buying Creation records so it could acquire Oasis didn’t and doesn’t actually occur (the parallels between that and say Glaxo buying a small business that’s developed a new drug are uncanny). More off putting was the record industry essentially writing the Digital Economy Act that Labour rushed through as one of their last acts in government after Peter Mandelson had some good times on David Geffen’s yacht.
I say ridiculous for various reasons. One, Feargal shall now be forever remembered as a wanker for reasons other than Teenage Kicks. Two, trendy record companies are repeatedly bringing the heavy-heavy handed legal threats at the same time as trying to be well, trendy. And three, they're continuing to use our legal system to hide their inadequacies as businesses at the same time as claiming to be a British business success story.
What the record companies now want is open to debate. One option I’m sure they dream about is taking us back to the early days of the last decade when you (well me) paid up to £21.99 for a single CD and that’s that really. The price hike in Whitney Houston greatest hit CDs following her death that was quickly put down to technical error (aye fucking right) supports this view. But, speaking as a consumer, would them being able to charge me anymore make for better product? Not going by past experience it wouldn't, rather the main difference it would have made was that Guy Hands top of the cycle, over paid leveraged buy-out of EMI would have probably worked, and that's kinda it really. The 80s, after all, when CDs emerged and profits were easy, was also the decade taste forgot as every second hand record shop bargain bin proves. Alternatively, record companies want to buy into something more akin to the cloud computing model other people have devised wherein nobody owns anything, but in exchange for a monthly fee can rent stuff for immediate - but restricted - consumption.
Either way, actually neither way, they just want people to stop pirating their product regardless. You’re left with the sense that while Britain may make the best popular music, the owners of the resultant copyrights are shite businesses. They may claim, when it suits and it isn’t the post-Christmas sales lull music award/ marketing season, to be just another business, which is fine, but can we please acknowledge that what they mean by this is they're more British Leyland than Tesco?
As for other media, fucks knows, just different flavours of exploitative, deceitful scum as the multimedia conglomerate News Corporation with its bye bye News of the World, hello Sunday Sun proves. Sky TV is a cash cow so they’re clearly still in the money and cinema is doing well give or take DVD sales presumably though here you’re left with that annoying thing of only stuff you legally buy comes complete with anti-piracy stuff you’ve no choice but to sit through.
The thing is though another reason music sales fell was because other, competing distractions appeared. It wasn’t just that people were choosing to download stuff, they were also spending more of their time playing games and surfing the net. And with their being only so many hours in the day (something the Digital Economy Act foolishly failed to address), something had to give. The other thing, the big thing no media conglomerate is willing to admit is the repeated finding that those most likely to download pirated material are also those who spend the most on legal stuff i.e. pirated stuff is as well as not instead of. Hence, the £15m p.a. losses record companies claim the RnBXclusive.com website induced are talking bollocks in a why are these people being allowed to tell such blatant lies at the same time as they’re getting to threaten people with severe legal action?
Thankfully, with the shutting down of megaupload, the emasculation of filesonic and so on we’ve got some lovely data emerging that can be used to empirically test all the media conglomerate shite about piracy; now that stuff isn’t as readily available as it was are legal product sales on the increase? Well? It’d also be quite cool to get a handle on the unintended consequences of going after easy targets/encouraging people to go underground to get pirated material.
In the meantime can we at least acknowledge the fact that the media conglomerates intent on criminalising vast swathes of the population have an undue influence over the legislative process, are ridiculously exploitative and have proven repeatedly incapable of adapting to new technology and changing consumer demands? That and the fact that because of them the living stain of faux big-sister diarrhoea that is Jo Whiley was used to explain the “mighty” Digital Economy Act on Panorama, a crime for which no one shall ever be forgiven.
* You’ve got to love the way that once the story broke and made it into the mass media the 10 year threat was taken offline. You’d almost think a PR/marketing bod suggested aggressively threatening to criminalise punters was perhaps not the best thing to do.
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