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

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СКАЧАТЬ of lawyers (such as those that Seagram chief Edward Bronfman Jr. threatened to unleash against the foes of copyright) and very well paid Washington lobbyists, working hard to shape laws that suit the powerful entertainment industry.

      Among the majors there are strongly perceived mutual interests in many areas. The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, is the trade association for the major (and many independent) labels’ activities in the United States. Its main activities are the monitoring of sales to award “gold” and “platinum” record status; keeping an eye out for music bootleggers and encouraging the police to enforce laws against them; and lobbying the government to enact laws that are favorable to the industry.

      The relationship of other rights bodies within the industry are relatively complex and are a fossil record that points to the past century of industry history, which was fraught with litigation and power grabs. Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and SESAC (which was once the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, but is now simply the acronym) all license music performances, such as playing a song over the radio or in a restaurant. The royalties from these performances go to the songwriters, who are not necessarily the band playing the tune. The Harry Fox Agency, a division of the National Music Publishers’ Association, oversees publishing rights to the music itself, as opposed to performances of that music. These are known as “mechanical rights.” That the lengthily negotiated pacts among artists, publishers, and labels is so hard for all parties to navigate has meant that the options presented by the fast and furious world of the Net have been met with near paralysis.

      From an early stage, there were people at the labels who experimented with computers. If their vision of how technology and music might meet was sometimes less inspiring than those of outsiders, it was, at least, rooted in experience. One such executive was Ted Cohen, a music biz player who became infected with the excitement of new technology.

      Cohen started out at the Boston office of Warner Brothers in 1972, and he worked his way up through local promotion to artist development. By 1977 he was asked to move to Burbank to work on career development with artists such as Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads, George Benson, Sex Pistols, and the Ramones. His job had all the glamorous highs and absurd lows that have become a part of the music business stereotype. Cohen would go from one week with a brand new band, driving around in a station wagon, to three months with the Who in a private plane complete with a bedroom and a shower. He dated one of the Who’s flight attendants, going out for every date in a different city. Although Cohen loved the music and much of the business, after several years the personalities began to take their toll on him.

      “In 1984 I went to the Beverly Center with the guys from King Crimson and saw the movie Spinal Tap,” Cohen recounted. The next day he quit his job. “That movie was my life: on the road, dealing with dumb English bands.” But by then, a seed planted earlier had begun to sprout.

      In 1982, while still at Warner, Cohen had been invited to join a committee alongside vice president Stan Cornyn to talk about the intersection between technology and music. Cohen found that Cornyn, who had a solid reputation throughout many parts of the industry, “was a futurist and was into imagining what the next cool thing would be.” They met to discuss ways to combine the Warner-owned (then highly successful) video game company Atari with music. They imagined discs of concerts with an assortment of bells and whistles, like guitars that changed sound with a mouse click. The committee lasted a year, until Atari got into trouble financially and was sold. But Cornyn and Cohen both still had the bug.

      In 1986, Cornyn was running The Music Group, “the first interactive music label,” cofunded by media and technology giant Philips, and was developing a CD-ROM and the CD-i format that would play on your television set. The latter format was abandoned once it was realized that the image quality on computer screens was much lower than required for television. Cohen joined up to work on the CD-ROM format, and in 1992, he worked on the genre-defining CD-ROM for New World Order by Todd Rundgren, along with unreleased prototypes for Sting and David Bowie. Cornyn experimented successfully with enhanced CDs for other bands, including The Cranberries, but after ten years The Music Group had burned through a considerable stack of cash and it was pretty clear that the format was not feasible for a mass market. In December 1996, the company shut its doors. But there was an upside: much of the research that went into fitting rock videos into music CDs proved to be valuable as Web technology developed and proliferated.

      By that time, the Web was already more popular than any of the projects the labels were funding themselves. Although the music business seemed as if it would contain the perfect companies to push forth and establish outposts on the new electronic frontier, most quarters of the record industry were less than sanguine about such prospects. Moving to the Web required a much greater conceptual leap for labels than did enhanced CDs, which were sold along with standard CDs and therefore required no change in the distribution model. The online world seemed geeky, unproven, and, as The Music Group showed, you could easily lose your shirt with the stuff. But technology just kept rolling on.

      In 1987, in the sleepy but prosperous Southern town of Erlangen, Germany, the Institut Integrierte Schaltungen, a part of research giant Fraunhofer, joined forces with the University of Erlangan, under Professor Dieter Seitzer, to craft an algorithm that could be used to shrink video files to a manageable size for use with multimedia. The 1980s were a long way from the modern era of cheap, fast computer processors and high-storage capacities. In order to make digital pictures play, researchers found they had to do something with the enormous media files. A “codec,” short for “compression/decompression algorithm,” is what was used to do the job, by smartly stripping away as much data as possible from a given file, while scientifically working to keep sound and video quality as high as possible. The Institut, and scientists such as Karlheinz Brandeburg, finally settled on the code for the audio part of their task. After the code was submitted and approved by the International Standards Organization, it became known as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer–3.

      The MP3 (as the name has been commonly shortened) encoding method got its power from using perceptual, or “psychoacoustic,” models that accounted for what listeners actually notice when they hear music or other sounds. Although the formula was crafted and ready to be used, it lay waiting for some kids to find it and shake things up.

      While Patterson and Lord were discovering the joys of the Internet as a way of exposing The Ugly Mugs and other unsigned bands, and Cohen was developing enhanced CDs, Jim Griffin, chief technology officer at Geffen Records, was trying to build a bridge between the music industry and the Web. Griffin had moved into the world of music technology from a background in journalism. As a reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, he developed an interest in the ways that the computer was transforming the newspaper business. This interest led him to accept a job in Washington, D.C., tracking and advising newspaper clients on the ways of new media.

      Griffin was eventually hired by Geffen because he was deemed a thought-leader who could assess and explain technological options. Griffin first gained credibility by convincing the company not to release enhanced CDs. After that, when he proposed ways for Geffen to experiment with Internet promotion, company executives were willing to do so, after some initial debate. Aerosmith’s unreleased “Head First” was the cut of choice. It was a giant leap for label-kind, and ironically it may have been a small step in the industry’s losing some of its control: a quick search of Napster shows that “Head First” is still floating around online today. The release was a controversial move, especially when Geffen’s owner, Universal, caught wind of it.

      “The parent company was not pleased,” said Griffin. “They knew that this sort of thing was the future, but I think their goal was to slow it down, as opposed to speed it up, and here we were speeding it up.” Griffin was attempting to straddle the thin line that separated the corporate innovators from the anti-establishment.

      David Weekly was on the other side of the divide that separated СКАЧАТЬ