Forget who you're going to vote for, just tell me which side of the great Napster divide you're on and I'll tell you who you are. There's no middle ground with Napster. It's either: "You've got to stop those online internuts! They're stealing the artists' royalties! What they're doing is illegal, so we're going to get a bevy of overpaid legal hirelings to sue the pants off all 40 million of them. If they keep this up, they're going to make record company executives obsolete, fer chrissakes!" Or the "internut" point of view, which is: "Free the artists from the corporate work camps! Free the musicians! Free music for the people!" (And if all else fails: "This is the future, dude, get with it!")
On the face of it, downloading songs you'd normally have to pay for and burning your own CDs would clearly seem to be stealing. Hey, this stuff ain't free, kid. But radio is free - what about that? Well, if you tape songs off the radio, isn't that stealing, too? When cassette recorders first came out back in the '60s, record companies went into the same hysterical tirades. "What's to stop people taping entire albums?" they said. "If this continues, no one will buy records, the recording industry will collapse, and the artists' children will starve!" Thirty years before that, record companies went ballistic over plain ol' radio. They did! Why would people buy 78s if they could hear music for free on the radio? And bear in mind that the same lawyers who helped the record companies jack the price of CDs up to $18 (Don't tell me there isn't price fixing in the recording industry!) are the same jackals claiming that Napster promotes theft.
Even if you're not a musician or don't own a record company, you could get yourself quite worked up about this stuff, so I thought I'd talk to someone who's actually in the thick of the fray. Trever Keith is the lead singer of Face to Face, a punk group whose current tour is sponsored by Napster (as was Limp Bizkit's earlier last year).
I asked Trever if he wasn't concerned that Face to Face fans might download their new album, Reactionary, and burn their own copies.
"First of all, you've gotta remember that it's a complete hassle to burn entire albums on Napster," Trever told me. "When you do a search to a bring up a band, you're gonna get every song they've ever recorded! And the songs are mixed up, based on which users have those files on their computer. So you have to sit there and go through every song, decide what song is from what record and then sequence them in the proper order. What college kids are mainly using Napster for is to make mixed CDs of their favorite tunes by different artists. Which we've been doing forever, ever since cassette tapes were invented back in the Stone Age.
"Of course, the ultimate concern to the record industry isn't what's happening right now, but what it could eventually mean for recorded music. They're worried that the whole world may turn over to a new system where no one buys records anymore and everything is downloaded, which, you know, sounds like science fiction to me. In the end, people want a physical product. With a nice picture on the cover. They don't want the cheap copy burned from your house."
I ask Trever about Chuck D's point that MP3s are the new radio. Radio, once (a long time ago) used to be where you'd hear new music, but with heavy-rotation Top 40, there aren't a lot of stations playing new stuff. And those that are, you probably can't pull in on your dial.
"Even if all the radio stations in the world played only new music," says Trever, "there's more music out there than time available. There's only so much time in a day and only so many slots available. The radio stations are going to play the music that works best for their advertisers and their formats. Radio is not really designed for finding and exploring new music. It's the classic clash of art and commerce that has existed ever since day one. The 'music business' - when you say those two words together, that's your clash between art and commerce right there.
"The internet, on the other hand, is a great place to discover all kinds of music. Plus, on the internet, you can find the radio stations that are playing new stuff. The internet is the last unconquered, untamed frontier. There's no middleman. You interact directly with your fans without going through a bunch of talking heads or red tape."
I ask him if he sees the punk ethic of Face to Face and its dedication to the democratic nature of the internet as coming from a similar impulse?
"I think it's very much the same thing. The internet is kinda like the final frontier in keeping a grass roots movement going. What's important about what bands like us are doing is that we try to keep the fans first."
Face to Face is so serious about internet freedom that they actually let their fans choose which songs (out of the sixteen or so they posted on their website) should go on their new album. Even if it meant that "Nullification," one of Trever's favorite tracks, didn't make the final cut. "Oh, well," he says, "our fans probably know what we like better than we do." Say, what?
The Great Napster Divide is sort of like a shift in the historical paradigm - a paradigm being a shift in consciousness that distinguishes one era from another - a radical change in point of view. Burning at the stake (Middle Ages) to burning the steak (late twentieth century). Or the switch from LPs to CDs - now there was a shift in the paradigm that the record companies loved. What a scam! How to get people to buy their record collections all over again at three times what they paid for the original LPs. And this time, of course, they'd never scratch or break or wear out. Yeah, right.
The internet - for the moment - looks as if it might shift the relationship between artists and record companies, even permanently change the way music gets distributed. It is ideally suited for bringing music directly to the listener without the ham-fisted interference of greedy corporate SOBs and their rabid, litigious lackies. But before we get ourselves too riled up, it should be pointed out that Napster, too, is a business. And while Napster now looks like a heroic David battling the lumbering, outdated Goliaths of the recording industry, who knows if in twenty years they won't have turned into the same sort of ruthless, bumbling blood-suckers they are now fighting.
Whatever you may read in the paper, I can tell you right now that Napster and their friends - in one form or another - are here to stay. The funny thing about progress, folks - especially in the last century or two - is its awesome inevitability. Air travel! ATMs! Cable television! Pentium 3s! Palm pilots! Drive-thrus! This is the USA, compadres. Whatever is bigger, easier, cheaper, and above all faster ... wins. Always.
So all you Luddites out there in record company land better get with the program. Sure, we may miss clunky Royal typewriters and major league baseball on weekday afternoons, but guess what? They ain't coming back.
Check out Face To Face's website, www.facetofacemusic.com for dates of their current tour and other interesting stuff.
Top