E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fight songs (continued)

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy declined to comment for this article. But the Downhill Battle folks dispute the record labels’ claims that file-sharing is taking the bread out of artists’ mouths. By and large, major-label musicians make a pittance on record sales, they point out. Most contracts earn musicians a matter of cents on every album sold, and some leave the artist in hock.

"So we tell people, ‘Don’t buy [major-label] CDs. It’s unethical,’" Wilson says. "You’re not giving money to the musicians you like, you’re just giving money to prop up this old system. Go to the show. It’ll be more fun, and money will actually be going to the right place, to a nice split between the local venue and the musician."

Downhill Battle doesn’t advocate file-sharing as way to "steal music," as the RIAA portrays it. Instead, they propose a collective licensing system in which all P2P users would pay a compulsory $5 or $10 monthly subscription fee. Payment would then be meted out proportionally to artists and labels according to the shared songs’ popularity. A white paper on the subject, prepared by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), claims that "starting with just the 60 million Americans who have been using file-sharing software, $5 a month would net over $3 billion of pure profit annually to the music industry." The advantages, EFF claims, are identical with the goals of Downhill Battle. First, "artists will now be paid for the file sharing that has become a fact of digital life." Second, "independent artists no longer need a record deal with a major label to reach large numbers of potential fans." Third, "artists will be able to use any mechanism they like, rather than having to rely on major labels to push radio play."

What’s more, it would preserve the largest music library in history, one that’s constantly growing and is always just a click away, something Reville calls "a powerful and compelling public good. Musicians would make a lot more money, fans would pay a lot less money for a lot more music. It’s almost unbelievable how much of a win-win it would be for everyone except the middle men."

But it’s not just about music. Downhill Battle has positioned itself at the forefront of a larger cultural and commercial battle that’s really only starting to take shape. Technological advances are opening new avenues by the day, but old business models are digging in, trying either to prevent progress or ensure that it’s controlled by them. The RIAA’s civil suits are old news by now, even as they keep coming. Potentially more frightening is pending legislation like the Induce Act, a bill proposed by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), which would drastically reshape copyright law, both putting the kibosh on all file-sharing software and further limiting any technology that could encourage copyright violation — iPods, say, or, in theory, VCRs and photocopiers. The result would be a chilling effect on any number of new technologies. The bill is currently moldering in committee, and may be dead for good. But Downhill Battle recognizes that, regardless of what happens to Hatch’s particular bill, this is a pivotal moment — one that necessitates its mandate to keep new technologies free and open and in the hands of the people.

Others are happy to see them do it. "We think that they’re on the right side of the vision, and we hope that they’re part of an alliance of forces that are going to bring about positive change," says Barbara Gottlieb, staff researcher at American University’s Center for Social Media, who recently gave Downhill Battle a $5000 grant to create a Web site that will explore how the Internet’s potential for community and self-expression is threatened by commercial interests. "This is not just about the music industry. This is a much larger issue that has to do with intellectual property and the privatization of products of thought. And how that increasing privatization is likely to impact the growth and the evolution of culture. As a society that wants to move forward, we need to protect these media and not allow them to fall into the hands of commercial owners, so our hands are tied behind our back. That’s what these guys are watching out for. And they’re right."

WILSON AND REVILLE launched Downhill Battle in August of 2003. "The major labels were all saying file-sharing was killing music, but it seemed like file-sharing was just killing major labels," says Reville. "Reading the news accounts, it was this alternate universe: why is the debate totally dominated by their point of view?"

"The only real counterpoint was dumb lobbyists from Kazaa," Wilson says, "speaking from an obviously self-interested standpoint."

"They don’t care at all about music," Reville adds.

But Downhill Battle does. "Mostly, we’re just fans," says Reville. "We play some bad guitar. It’s more about the culture, and being engaged in music. We come from political-organizing backgrounds, and this is an area where we have a real chance to de-corporatize a big chunk of American culture. And it’s something that can realistically happen in the next couple years."

Downhill Battle’s first real star turn came this past February, on Grey Tuesday. Brian Burton, a/k/a DJ Danger Mouse, had taken "mash-up" technology (wherein two disparate songs are melded to create a third) one step beyond, and digitally combined snippets of the Beatles’ White Album with rhymes from Jay-Z’s The Black Album to make 12 tracks called — you guessed it — The Grey Album. EMI, which controls the Beatles’ catalogue, immediately demanded he stop distributing the promo copies he’d pressed. Wilson and Reville, seeing this as a quintessential example of both the new artistic avenues opened up in the digital age and the illogic of copyright law, decided to host The Grey Album on a site they created, GreyTuesday.org, and encouraged other Web sites to do the same. Approximately 170 sites took up the cause, and another several hundred shaded their home pages gray in solidarity. "After a survey of the sites that hosted files during Grey Tuesday, and an analysis of filesharing activity on that day," Wilson and Reville wrote on the Grey Tuesday homepage, "we can confidently report that The Grey Album was the number-one album in the US on February 24."

"We got cease-and-desist orders [from EMI] the day before," Reville remembers. "But we issued a response saying, ‘Here’s why we’re not gonna comply, and why we think that your legal campaign is both not legally founded and bad for music,’ and we put that on our Web site and we went ahead with it. We never heard from them again."

Reville guesses that, at peak, GreyTuesday.org probably had a million and a half hits. Since then, he says, DownhillBattle.org has enjoyed about 3500 to 4000 unique visitors every day. All told, including hits to Downhill Battle’s humorous one-off pages (such as "iTunes iSbogus" and WhataCrappyPresent.com), there have probably been about four million visitors since the site’s launch. Fiscally, however, it’s still a modest operation. Take about $4000 in piecemeal donations, around $5000 in merchandise sales, add in some income from a handful of programming jobs, plus a grant here and there like the one they received from American University, and it’s plain that the Downhill Battlers are hardly living high on the hog.