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the RIAA and MP3: in SEARCH of a CLUE

"Music is spiritual The music business is not."

--Van Morrison

It's bad enough that the RIAA doesn't get it. I'll gladly sympathize with anyone being overwhelmed by the careening pace of technology. But the RIAA doesn't just not get it--they refuse to get it, in their dogged determination to take cluelessness to new depths.

Case in point: The raging controversy surrounding the Internet-distributable MP3 music format, which has the Recording Industry Association of America desperately clutching its copyrights again, for fear that MP3 will have savvy music fans downloading them out of business. The organization flaunted its ignorance in something called "The Top Ten MP3 Myths." Consider Myth #10: "Record companies just don't get it!" The rebuttal: "False. A conversation between Jim Griffin, formerly of Geffen Records, and the MP3 coalition vividly shows record companies most certainly DO get it. They care about the Web and want to develop the online music business." Unfortunately, the link provided to the Griffin quote takes you to a "404: file not found" error.

Here's a hint, guys and gals: the convincing response to "you just don't get it" is never "we do so get it, so there." But an even worse way to underscore your cluelessness than protesting too much is trying to support it with an unavailable soundbyte. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the RIAA has done with "Soundbyting," a "campaign to protect music on the Internet." Targeted at universities and students, the Soundbyting site (http://www.soundbyting.com) was probably intended to address college-age MP3 users in what the RIAA imagines is their own language. The site succeeds brilliantly in conveying an insufferably arrogant, overbearing, confrontational tone tailor-made to incite that audience into abandoning whatever respect for others' creative property they might have once had. I'm old enough to have a kid that age, I've never downloaded an MP3 file in my life, and this site made me positively yearn to fill a dozen CDs with them out of sheer spite.

The RIAA, after their campaign produced an online backlash described by Michael Robertson of MP3.com as "swift and brutal," fired the PR firm who concocted the Web site for them. They still weren't smart enough to take down the August 1998-vintage Soundbyting site.

And don't let the high-minded rhetoric about protecting artists fool you. The RIAA's crusade against the MP3 format is just another example of entrenched interests trying to stop or control new technologies that they perceive as threatening to their livelihoods. True to form, the RIAA is trying to fight new technology and those who use it, rather than understand and use the technology for their own benefit.

get it? you've already got it!

Perhaps never in the history of technology has an established industry been in a better position to take advantage of something that they are utterly powerless to stop. While other industries spend enormous amounts of money and effort to develop and popularize new standardized hardware and software for distributing their content, the music industry already has it, for free. Everything they need to use the Internet as a distribution medium is already in place. In fact, at least part of the reason for the ongoing demand for more bandwidth and CD-Recordable technology is the availability of MP3 files. Some of those files are illegal, granted, but many are not--they are provided by independent artists who aren't waiting for a recording contract to "legitimize" their music.

As Robert Seidman, publisher of Seidman's Online Insider (http://www.onlineinsider.com), wrote in an open letter to music company executives, "It's not unthinkable that in a few years, you could have 20 million or more people paying $20 or more a month" for an MP3 Internet music service. "You could then maybe sell them other things too ... but that really misses the point. You ALREADY have something to sell that people want to buy. Embrace the technology that will make it EASIER for your customers to do this, not harder. It will come around and bite you if you don't."

the high price of getting it

On December 15, 1998, the RIAA hosted a press conference in New York to announce the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). Described as "a framework" for working "with the technology community to create a voluntary digital music security specification by" fall 1999, the SDMI Forum's projected specification will apply not only to music distributed over the Internet, but to DVD-Audio and other music distribution media. SDMI is called an "open forum for all commercial companies significantly involved in technologies relating to digital music." Significantly involved, it turns out, equates to the ability to pay $50,000 for membership at the highest (steering committee) level and $10,000 for all other members. If the forum is unable to do its business in one year, the yearly dues drop to a more affordable $25,000 and $5,000.

At this rate, it's not likely that the members of the "MP3 community" or the independent artists who supply them with music will be part of this initiative. Meanwhile, the MP3 phenomenon--already in full swing--shows no signs of waiting for the RIAA and SDMI to catch up. And the RIAA shows no signs of realizing that you can't stop the music.

Dana J. Parker (danapark@ix.netcom.com) is a Denver, Colorado-based independent consultant and writer and regular columnist for STANDARD DEVIATIONS. She is also a contributing editor for EMedia Professional, co-author of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook [Pemberton Press, 1996], and chair of Online Inc.'s DVD Pro Conference & Exhibition.

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