REPORT: MP3 Music Files and the Internet
- Bob Gajarsky
Imagine sitting at home in your easy chair, and wanting to hear some different Pearl Jam songs. No, not "Alive"...but their live cover of the Who's "The Kids Are Alright".
In the past, the only way to hear such a song was to catch one of the local radio stations obtaining a promotional copy of the concert, and being fortunate enough to listen at the time they played the track. However, with the advent of high speed modems, web sites with gigabytes of space, and an Internet account, a fan can listen to that song, any time they want.
Real Audio - in which your computer is turned into a 'radio', enabling you to hear the song in realtime - is one way to hear these files. However, the controversy over songs on the web doesn't center so much around files in RA, as they are known, but around files in WAV and MP3 format.
The wave (WAV) file is the actual bits and bytes of a song. A four minute song takes up approximately 50 megabytes worth of space - more than a user's disk quota on many Internet accounts.
A compression technique can be applied to these WAV files - with a minimal loss of quality, by removing 'inaudible' information - to produce an MP3 file. With this technique, a four minute song can be stored on a hard drive with 5 megabytes of space. And because of these compression techniques, music fans are taking to the web to share and exchange their MP3 files - of songs available in stores, and those that aren't available elsewhere.
A quick search on the web yielded full MP3 songs from Duran Duran including many of their classic hits ( "View To A Kill", "Rio", "Girls On Film", "Save a Prayer", "Wild Boys", "Reflex", "All She Wants Is", "Hungry Like The Wolf") and some of their more recent singles ("Come Undone", "Ordinary World", "Out Of My Mind", "Electric Barbarella"). With a little time and perseverance, a Duran fan could create their own greatest hits disc for free, instead of purchasing Decade or any of the other Duran Duran discs.
One employee of BMG Music - a former musician - is worried about the ripple effects that MP3 copying could have within the music industry. "My fears about MP3s are twofold," begins the employee. "The illegal transfer of music through MP3s directly cut into albums sales which, in turn, directly cut into a label's profits meaning large scale cutbacks and layoffs. I also see it as a major blow to struggling musicians who depend on every dollar they make from royalties and album sales. It also cuts into the creativity fold where music is treated like a commodity and not as art. By transferring music as 'just a file', it takes away from the human aspect of music as art, not as product. To strip it (the song) down to a computer file is to ignore the concept of the CD as a functional and recreational work of art."
The editor of the premier MP3 newsletter on the Internet, and webmaster of Dimension Music ( http://www.dimensionmusic.com ) goes by the alias 'Spyed'. His newsletter has increased in size over the last few months to include more than 4,000 subscribers, and the website offers links to numerous MP3 sites on the 'net. He offers an alternate view to the MP3 controversy.
"Artists, many of them, love music, not money; they like millions to listen to their music, and a true artist wants their music heard," explains Spyed. "If you ask me, MP3's aren't putting a dent in anything; they aren't doing anything other than promoting GOOD music. A good CD will always be bought; MP3 files just give us the opportunity to listen to (other) tracks that are on a CD we want to buy."
One area which has industry executives even more worried than the wholesale uploading of MP3s to the net is outright piracy of artist's music. It is fairly common knowledge that there are certain 'spies' on the Usenet newsgroups who seek out music pirates by pretending to be interested consumers. Postings in Usenet during the last few months only serve to reinforce the executives' fears.
A recent disc offered for sale from a dealer in Hong Kong offered 14 complete albums - including the Backstreet Boys, 'Love Songs', and in the ultimate theft, a copy of Elton John's charity single, "Candle In The Wind 97", for $15 postpaid. And one company with a U.S. toll-free number, offered a similar deal as the Hong Kong company (but this time, with 'your favorite type of music') by spamming the Internet with their proud claim that they will sell you 10 hours of music on one disc. In the same breath, they state that "the record companies and major labels do not want you to know about this. It could ruin their big push for DVD in the next six months (or whenever they get off their ass), not to mention the fact that it could spawn rampant trading and copying of music, just as software is traded and copied today." In this case, of course, the omission of the word 'illegal' is quite noticable - but makes one wonder if these pirates have heard of the software busts which have garnered national press attention.
MP3s are also being used by loyal fans to share rare and live recordings of their favorite artists. Tracks which were previously only available by travelling to a major city and purchasing discs stored under the counter are now being shared for free across the Internet.
For every Tears For Fears or Pet Shop Boys that issue a B-sides compilation filled with out-of-print tracks, there are artists including Bruce Springsteen, Erasure, and Morrissey whose fans would kill for a 'legitimate', comprehensive, B-sides project - and if they want one, have to shell out big bucks in the black market. And even an R.E.M. - whose Dead Letter Office was a flashback at most of their B-sides during the I.R.S. years - have dozens of tracks which haven't seen the commercial light of day in America.
A representative of a major independent label sees the potential benefits and hindrances of releasing rare tracks on the Internet. "MP3s could both held and hurt sales of bands' records. As a means of getting music into the hands of people who might not necessarily had the opportunity to come across an otherwise obscure band, MP3s could spur new sales of a band. And if the Internet supplied alternate versions of songs that were otherwise unavailable to the public (i.e. radio edits, club versions, demos and alternate takes), MP3s would be a blessing. In this capacity, they would not be interfering with the sale of a band's album and might in fact spike sales of the record if people like what they heard."
Some fans are already bootlegging the bootleggers. The Oasis bootleg disc The Untold Story consists primarily of pre-Creation/Sony Oasis recordings, where the band sounds like a cross between the Stone Roses, Charlatans, and Inspiral Carpets - or similar to 90% of the British unsigned bands of the time. The part of the disc with these unreleased tracks has been actively copied across the net by fans who feel the music should be available for free, and not putting money into the pockets of the bootleggers. But will this hurt those who sell live and rare music?
One New York retailer who specializes in audio releases not available in regular stores doesn't think so. "Although people can get these songs from the Internet, it shouldn't hurt my business," believes this merchant. "How many people want to spend hours downloading the files, spending the money on buying a recorder, and learning how to handle the process? They'd rather spend $20, get the same stuff, and pop it immediately in their CD player."
The record companies aren't pleased over these turn of events with MP3s. Sony / Creation sent a cease and desist letter to numerous Oasis-related sites last summer, threatening legal action if the sites didn't remove copyrighted materials (read: pictures and sounds) from their web pages. This sparked the beginning of a grass-roots groundswell, and an "Oasis Webmasters for Internet freedom" web page, which cites '35 closed or missing sites' as a result of the legal threats. One of those people whose site was closed had posted songs from Be Here Now , prior to its release. This person claimed that he had obtained the song files from Sony's Brazil web pages.
This isn't the first time in which songs from an album appeared on the Web before its release in the stores. Depeche Mode's Ultra appeared on European web sites several months before its release (as reported in the February 27, 1997 Consumable) and Pearl Jam's Yield also surfaced well before its February 2 commercial release. Actions such as these usually draw the most attention from the record companies.
While the controversy over MP3 rages, in some circles, technophiles are eagerly awaiting the next step of compression; Advanced Audio Compression. Combining high bit rates and the used of MMX technology, AAC files offer a faster rate of compression, better sound quality, and takes up 2/3 the space of MP3 files.
For now, however, the method of choice of music compression on the Internet is MP3s. And this new technology has opened up a Pandora's box of opinions of its legality, and what the future of music will look like.
