With the global takeover of the internet in the late 1990’s, the record industry in the last 10 years has suffered and the face of it has changed a great deal. In 1999 a company called Napster was founded. Napster allowed users to upload and download music from a central server, essentially undermining any copyright laws that had been put in place on the music. The response of this was the passing of a bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which made all copyright laws applicable to digital information. Napster was shut down in 2000 due to a number of different lawsuits from artists and record companies who had found their music on Napster’s central server, most notably artists like heavy metal band Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre. The central server sharing network looked something like this.
The response from the ‘peer software developers’ was to create peer-to-peer software sharing, and that the program/website would merely act as a sort of bridge between the users, and any information would travel from the users’ computers themselves. With no information being stored on a central server, peer-to-peer file sharing companies like Kazaa or Limewire can operate without any legal intervention.Peer-to-peer sharing networks look something like this.
The problem for the music industry with peer-to-peer sharing is that each individual user is held accountable for the copyright information on their computers, and the record companies cannot sue a large corporation. Because there are so many users who are uploading and downloading information through peer-to-peer networks, record companies simply don’t have the ability to sue millions of individuals for internet copyright settlements that would not even match the amount they’d have to spent in legal expenses. The response to this by the record industry was to file a few major lawsuits in order to make example of users who were downloading/uploading immense amounts of copyright files and to launch an advertising campaign against the illegal downloading of music. To say the least, this didn’t really work. Peer-to-peer sharing became more and more popular and soon illegal downloads matched that of purchased downloads/albums.
This devastated this music industry, and many record companies were struggling not to collapse. Musicians were losing their royalties and were forced to rely on playing live in order to continue obtaining any sort of income. Many musicians that had already established themselves before the crash of the music industry actually embraced it and band likes Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails released their new music independently, for free and began extensive tours which ended with a large amount of money in their pocket. In fact, because the record company was not organizing the tour and taking a certain amount from the revenue for promotion, many musicians were able to match the royalties they would have made from the royalties off their album with a tour.
Here is a link to the Nine Inch Nails albums, the latest two are available for free download.
For established, passionate, hard-working musicians, the industry’s collapse didn’t mean anything except more touring and less money from royalties. The effect is felt most by aspiring artist’s who haven’t quite ‘made it’. This is outlined and explained in an interview I found with one of my favorite artists: ‘Maynard James Keenan’ of bands ‘Tool’, ‘A Perfect Circle’ and recently ‘Puscifer’.
Maynard James Keenan
http://www.theredalert.com/features/keenan.php
Maynard James Keenan is probably one of the most accomplished musicians, and many people say ‘Everything he touches turns to gold’. With a Grammy under his belt and a status of an ‘art rock legend’, Maynard knows the industry inside and out. In this interview he explains how since the industry is so paranoid about losing money, they are investing everything in the mainstream and what they are ‘sure of’. They aren’t taking any ‘chances’ by signing and giving exposition to more innovative and experimental music.
This idea is further explained in this short interview with Frank Zappa, one of experimental rock music’s most prolific contributors. This video is quite hold, however everything he explains in it is still true, even more so now with the amount of market research that is involved in the music business. This interview is actually very striking and thought provoking, and really changes the idea of what type of record executives are responsible for what attitude toward music.
The Life and Death of the Recording Industry 