Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music. John Alderman
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Название: Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music

Автор: John Alderman

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Музыка, балет

Серия:

isbn: 9780007404803

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ sent in on cassette tape, leaving the encoding to the staff, for which the company charged a small fee. Anyone could pay $240 a year and post one song and band photos and offer merchandise for sale. It was a learning experience for all involved. It gave Lord, among other things, a lesson in the power of PR. Following the other now-familiar Web start-up pattern, the media was quick to pick up on IUMA’s high-tech buzz, and the newly minted executive quickly learned to fan the fires of publicity with revolutionary rhetoric.

      “This is going to kill the music industry,” Lord proclaimed to the San Jose Mercury News in 1993. From the pages of the Silicon Valley daily newspaper, it was a quick jump to CNN and then the cover of Billboard. The music industry had a new and boisterous, if somewhat ill-defined and as yet naive, foil. Like a clever youngster testing limits, Lord and IUMA helped point the Internet generation at a new target against which it could gauge its growing strength. The music industry was a dinosaur that didn’t understand the promise of the Net and had stifled its own creativity through the pursuit of corporate profits. This unsteady new establishment wanted to take over.

      IUMA promised to be the place where less overtly commercial bands could create Web pages and reach more diverse audiences, despite the high-tech threshold for Internet use. In 1993, less than 3 percent of American classrooms were connected to the Net, compared to more than half in 2000. Even when traffic was minimal, music clips were being downloaded from as far away as Russia—an appealing prospect to bands unaccustomed to being heard outside their hometowns. Remember, at the time it was novel to make human contact of any kind using your computer; to have distant foreigners visit your Web site and listen to music you had just kicked out seemed very futuristic indeed. As the country, and the stock market, became obsessed with Internet technology, the pace picked up, and the breadth and speed of Internet delivery accelerated. In a 1994 issue of early cyber-culture magazine Mondo 2000, avant-garde musician Kenneth Newby interviewed Lord and Patterson and described IUMA as a “kind of digital club where the bands play for free, there’s no cover charge, and the owners are just happy that you came.”

      This kind of description echoed popular expectations of the Web in general, raising a question that would haunt nearly everyone who had some creative, digitized product that they hoped to sell on the Web: How did the Internet develop into a giant playground where everyone expected things to be free? Once a piece of work was digitized, Web users seemed to instinctively feel that it was fair game for anyone who wanted to download it.

      The recording industry seemed unconcerned with IUMA, and if it noticed at all, it was to take advantage of IUMA’s service, on a very small scale. The small, progressive, Warner-affiliated label 4AD Records, for example, had Web pages created for its bands. Other than that, music industry insiders simply made a note to have a talk with IUMA’s founders, to affirm that they were all interested in doing cool stuff.

      As Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has put it, the code from which the Net is built is the law. Many of the expectations about online music are the legacy of builders themselves, and many beliefs are based on the structure of the networks. Those who built the Web, though a very diverse bunch, tended to share many similar goals. The Internet, of course, arose from the bowels of the Cold War infrastructure of military and education. It was a way of distributing research and military data using computer networks that spurted “packets” of information across multiple lines to be later reassembled into their original form at the final destination. The system, as developed at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), promised a quick, if somewhat quirky method of communication that included not only the sharing of programs and data over great distance, but also radio messaging that would not break down due to jamming or geography.

      For a research-oriented group, the ability to share data from around the country and around the world was the main interest. The likelihood of commercial rights holders asserting their claims was not much of a concern; in fact all commercial activity was officially off-limits on the Net until 1991. Commercial interest wasn’t great anyway until the World Wide Web transformed the rather arcane communication tools of the Net into lively multimedia portals, ready to open on command on the screens of the workforce, student body, and swelling ranks of home users who were just getting comfortable with their PCs.

      Many of those involved in the creation of the Web had lofty, socially ambitious goals that involved making it as easy as possible to share information, and many expected to foster a leap in human knowledge and culture that could usher in another Renaissance. “The Web,” Tim Berners-Lee wrote, “was designed as an instrument to prevent misunderstandings.” The system that he designed encouraged the free spread of what would later be called “content,” and he was not alone in feeling inspired by beliefs that were strongly optimistic, even verging on utopian.

      “The whole spread of the Web happened not because of a decision and a mandate from any specific authority, but because a whole bunch of people across the ’Net picked it up and brought up Web clients and servers,” Berners-Lee wrote in an essay about the overlapping goals of the Web and Unitarian religion. “The actual explosion of creativity, and the coming into being of the Web was the result of thousands of individuals playing a small part. In the first couple of years, often this was not for a direct financial gain, but because they had an inkling that it was the right way to go, and a gleam of an exciting future.”

      The Web was at first slow and buggy, especially for home users, but the excitement of a multimedia network was catchy, and what can only be described as a mass migration of work and culture online began. Because the impact of the Web was so profound and widespread, many metaphors were tossed around in an attempt to describe and assess its impact. Comparisons to Gutenberg’s development of the printing press, highways, and casbahs all reflected the particular viewpoints of the describers, most of whom were in awe of the potential. After all, a lot had been done with tools as simple as e-mail, mailing lists, and bulletin boards. It was just those kinds of tools, together with the tape recorder, that had been the secret behind the success of the Grateful Dead.

      The first online mailing list ever dedicated to a single group (originating at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) was dedicated to the Dead. “It was appropriate that it was about the Grateful Dead,” explained Steve Silberman, probably the most articulate expert on the band, “because the Grateful Dead was one of the first groups to develop a truly mobile community of fans, who would follow the band from venue to venue on every tour. The way that the Dead played music was inextricably related to the fact that they developed a mobile community of fans.”

      Silberman believed that the experiences of the band and its fans carry insight about the nature of musical communities when they meet the power of electronic networking. The Grateful Dead changed their set lists every night, and they changed the way they played each song every night. That modus operandi inspired Stanley Owsley, an LSD chemist and visionary sound engineer, to suggest to the band, sometime around 1968, that they should record every show to amass a vault of recordings.

      As the band began recording live performances, fans followed suit with their own recordings. The Dead gave a free concert on Haight Street in San Francisco in 1968, and a reel-to-reel tape of that show was recorded by one Steve Brown. That tape ended up being copied and passed around by soldiers in Vietnam, after Brown took it with him when he went over for a tour of duty. It became a “coveted” item among the Deadheads who were fighting, said Silberman, who has written an encyclopedia on The Dead, Skeleton Key.

      As the network of traders grew, they initially relied on exchanging business cards at shows to stay in touch. Then, as the personal computer surged in popularity, Deadheads were among the largest cultural groups of early adopters, mostly due to the incredible usefulness of bulletin board systems or BBSs, dial-in computer networks that not only let you trade gossip and tapes, but also let you make friends with—and stay in daily contact with—members of the Dead inner СКАЧАТЬ