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Napster and the Major Labels or "Ha, Ha, You Fucking Deserve It!"You hear no sympathy from me in the Napster debate. The way I see it, the Big Five (or is it four now?) majors have been damaging music for long enough. Their commercial interests have been limiting creativity for years, they have destroyed vinyl as a commercial medium, and they've ruined many a hardworking band. You've heard all of this before and you can certainly find it again in Albini's now-legendary Baffler article ("Some of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked").Twenty-eight states sued the Big Five a couple of weeks ago. The cost of CDs has been going up nearly a dollar per year. Walk into a chain record store, look at the 20.99 CDs, and think about the ramifications. Music cannot be bought nearly as casually as it once was. Even independent releases are more expensive than they were a few years ago. At my local record store, the $11 CD (a mainstay for years) is now up to $13. Despite the study that showed Napster users actually buy MORE music than non-Napsterites, despite the statistics that record sales have gone up in the past year, and despite the fact that most people I know still want the artwork and packaging and higher sound quality of an actual CD or LP, the majors are still flipped out about Napster and the mp3 format in general. Can you really feel sympathy for them? My initial draft of this column was a totally angry rant against the Big Five for all of their evils; I cut it down to the first paragraph. But seriously, can you think of a more evil force in music than the major record labels? They're even more evil than Malcolm McLaren, Tabitha Soren, or Bill Laswell. One must seriously question that if major labels really are losing profits via Napster, won't independent labels be hurt as well? I'm not worried myself, because of the above-stated fact: most serious music fans still want to own the actual item. A zip disk does not cut it. If anything, Napster will separate the serious music connoisseur from the casual college student who just wants to listen to the new Dr. Dre record. Perhaps all of the indie labels will go under (including my own), and I'll be eating these words in a year. This brings up the question of quality control. Can Napster be used, somehow, to distill the glut of product that sometimes--let's be honest--the consumer could do without? Personally, I have used Napster for almost exclusively out-of-print music. Neil Young's On the Beach and Faust's So Far cannot be purchased, so no one is losing money. Perhaps some settlement can be reached where the service will ultimately be used for only out-of-print music. I, for one, would be satisfied with that.
john fail
2000 aug 25 |
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