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Digital divides
John Alderman’s Sonic Boom

BY MATT ASHARE

Most people have little or no idea how musicians actually earn a living. There are a number of good reasons for this. For starters, the economic details of anything, including making music, just aren’t terribly interesting. But beyond that, the music industry — from the presidents of the five major labels right on down to the local lawyer who will happily charge a band a couple hundred bucks to look over their first indie-label deal — would probably rather you didn’t know the terms of a basic record contract, because for the most part they’re appallingly unfair to the artists. The arrangement looks a lot like indentured servitude — in most cases, a band will end up owing the label money.

Anyone interested in getting a better sense of how things play out for signed bands should look at "The Problem with Music," a short essay producer/musician Steve Albini wrote for the Baffler that’s anthologized in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler (Norton). After spewing a hefty dose of his trademark vitriolic rhetoric, Albini crunches the numbers in order to illustrate what an average band with a record deal might expect to make in a year of recording, touring, and otherwise promoting an album. His conclusion: "The band . . . has made the music industry more than three million dollars richer but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about a third as much as they would working at a 7-Eleven, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."

It’s not a pretty picture. But over the past decade, thanks to developments in digital technology and the advent of the Internet as a vehicle for commerce, new business models have been popping up — models that don’t require bands to play by rules of the standard contract. John Alderman’s new Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music (Perseus) chronicles the uneasy and often volatile marriage between music and the Internet that, until the events of September 11, had been in the spotlight ever since a kid named Shawn Fanning turned his nickname, "Napster," into the hottest music site on the Internet.

By now, pretty much everyone understands how Napster works: it’s a place where you can trade MP3-formatted copies of songs with no interference from or involvement with the bands or labels. And MP3 is just shorthand for an algorithm that shrinks music files to a manageable (i.e., transferable) size without a noticeable loss in fidelity.

The bulk of Alderman’s book is devoted to explaining how the present crisis over music on the Internet — a crisis that has disemboweled Napster and sent on-line music traders scurrying to Gnutella and any number of other less visible services — came to be. Tracking down most of the major players from inside and outside the music business, he shows how the unbridled curiosity of a few very smart people coupled with the ambition of a few savvy business-minded people — all of it ignored by a cartel of multinational media companies, who engaged in a form of mass denial until it was too late — led to the current situation. On the bright side, this is the first opportunity artists have had in some time to rewrite the rules of the record business in a way that is more favorable to the people who create the music.

Yet the most interesting, and in a way the most relevant, part of Alderman’s book wasn’t written by Alderman. Instead, it’s the foreword penned by Evan I. Schwartz, a short, five-page anecdote in which he points out that though artists and labels may be grumbling about the copyright-infringement problems that the Internet poses, the smart money in today’s market is in trademarks. See, you can’t copyright the name They Might Be Giants; you can copyright only a TMBG song. However, you can trademark the They Might Be Giants name, which means that the band control anything — a T-shirt, a skateboard, a phone card, a football — that has the TMBG name on it. Take one look at what the Elvis Presley estate has done with such trademarks as "Heartbreak Hotel" and you’ll see that though music may be the art, the true artistry is in merchandising. Let fans have the music for free as downloadable digital files — that cat, after all, is already out of the bag. If they like what they hear, then they’ll be happy to pay $30 for the same $8 Metallica T-shirt that Shawn Fanning wore to the MTV Music Video Awards last year.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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