Copy me: Technological change and the consumption of music
=======================================================================

### Nick White  
### 2009

> For those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power
> of the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand.
> The industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord,
> but it is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land.
> (Moglen 2001)

Introduction
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Technological changes have political implications. Changing the way we
interact with things encourages a reconsideration of the rules and
institutions that have governed previous interactions with them.

The current debate about copies of recorded music using the Internet
is an excellent example of this, and by examining it one may better
understand the relations between people and recorded music, and
between listeners and the traditional publishers of music.

While undoubtedly a great deal may be usefully said and examined in
other technological changes in music recordings, I will here focus
primarily on filesharing, as it is something I have been somewhat
involved in myself, and hence I have significantly more knowledge
'from the inside.'

I will begin by discussing traditional definitions of 'commodity,'
and then move on to a very brief overview of historical trends in
copying and music recording. I will also touch upon the printing
press in order to discuss the creation and rationale behind copyright
laws, which form a major part the present filesharing debate. I will
then go into greater depth into the current practises of people who
share music on filesharing networks, and the response by the recording
industry, before embarking on an analysis of the meaning and
significance of some of these new practises and dialogues.

It should be noted that I'm speaking primarily of England and the
United States of America, and the situation will be somewhat different
in other parts of the world.


The Meaning of 'Commodity'
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The word 'commodity' has been used variously to talk about items of
exchange. In the capitalist market a 'commodity' is defined as having
several key features, from which are derived appropriate rules of
trade.

Commodities are also generally assumed to be rival and exclusive; that
is in trading an item one loses access to it.

The most important feature of a commodity is that it be comparable to
another commodity, in order that their relative values may be judged
so that one may establish an exchange value for the item. Indeed
Kopytoff (1986) goes so far as to claim that wherever exchange
technology is introduced which allows a greater range of things to be
compared (such as for example money in newly colonised regions), more
objects are commodified.

Two commonly identified means of deciding on the relative value of a
commodity are use value and exchange value. Use value is based upon
the utility of the commodity, whereas exchange value is based upon
the amount of labour that went in to creating it. (Sterne 2006: 830)
Different systems of exchange weigh the relative merits of utility
versus production labour to value commodities differently.

Assigning value to works of art is of course a very difficult and
personal task, revealing a great deal about the valuer as well as
what is being valued. Several commentators have argued - Adorno and
Horkheimer (1972) perhaps most strongly - that to assign an artwork
an agreed-upon value in order to facilitate its exchange undermines
both the personal and the transcendent nature of art, and inevitably
devalues and debases it.


The History of Recorded Music
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While such concepts of commodity appear to map quite easily onto most
physical objects, using such terms to talk about recordings of one
sort or another is generally less straightforward.

Indeed the technology of the printing press, by dramatically reducing
the production cost of creating copies of written works, was an early
example of the difficulty of reconciling ideas of commodity with the
new properties of exchange enabled. To be more specific, by enabling
near-perfect copies of a work to be made, the qualities of rivalness
and exclusivity which were assumed of a commodity were altered. While
the initial creation costs of a work remained high, the cost of
subsequent copies dropped dramatically, making it economically
feasible to make and sell copies of works in a far less centralised
manner.

In the free market the cost to produce something is the means of
determining its exchange value, which becomes more problematic when
means of mechanical reproduction become available. This is as the
production cost differs very significantly between the item produced
and its copy. Whereas the first work costs perhaps one year's salary
for an author, plus the amount for the set up of the book in the
press, plus the materials needed, plus the working of the press, a
great many subsequent copies may be made for only the cost of
additional materials and working the press again. The exchange-value
of all subsequent copies is extremely low, but does not take into
account the author's salary.

Publishers chose to create a business model in which the initial
production costs of a work could be compensated by subsequent
printings, which would be priced a little over the exchange value
which the free market would assign. However such a model was
undermined if a competitor took a work which had already been
paid-for and produced their own copies at a price closer to its
exchange value. In order for publishers to ensure the feasibility of
their business-model concepts of copyright were enshrined into law,
removing the right of anybody but the author (or more typically a
publisher designated by them) to print a given work.

In so doing publishers legally repressed the new economic qualities
printing presses bestowed on the written word - less exclusivity -
and instead artificially mirrored the model of scarcity under which
which the majority of the market operated.

This way of business worked reasonably well, and when it became
feasible to produce of mechanical reproductions of music, publishers
adopted essentially the same model, using copyright laws to ensure a
monopoly sufficient to pay back the initial creation costs.

However this model was threatened somewhat by the introduction of new
technologies which dramatically decreased the expense, size and
difficulty of copying music to the point that many private individuals
could do so themselves. Whereas previously making unauthorised copies
had been limited to large operations, new technology now enabled a
much larger group of people to copy and share recorded music,
independent of any external organisation. While such home-copied music
was generally of noticeably poorer quality than an officially
sanctioned copy, widespread use made clear that for many the virtue of
sharing music was worth some degradation in quality.

Publishers were unsurprisingly hostile towards home copying of the
work which they had released, invoking the fact that such activity was
technically breaking copyright laws (though these laws had been
drafted with rival businesses in mind), and arguing that home copying
was causing a reduction in their sales of music which would result in
a smaller number of musicians able to be supported by them.
(Commentators such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) argue that a
smaller pool of musicians would make no real difference to the quality
of output from the publishers, as by their nature they homogenise and
will only support acts which propound their world-view. See below.)
Over time however the publishers found that there was no realistic way
to stop home-copying, and resigned themselves to a position of quiet
grumbling. People evidently still bought copies of music produced by
publishers, due to factors such as increased sound quality and
included cover artwork, and the belief that by doing so one was
ensuring the continuance and success of the musician.

With the new technologies of music compression, filesharing software
and cheap internet access came a far more significant threat to the
business model of music publishers.

Computers on an electronically are primarily copying machines of
anything digitisable - almost any task performed on a computer
requires the copying of digital information across various parts of
the computer. The measure of how quickly information can be copied
between different parts is a significant measure of how fast a
computer is said to be. And so it is when networking computers
together, and as such a primary focus of network engineering is
ensuring copying between computers is as fast and efficient as
possible. Computer networks at their core are no more than
geographically insensitive copying systems.

By allowing anybody with an internet connection to share music with
anyone else with an internet connection with no more effort than
setting up a filesharing program, a global network of available music
was created. Now anybody with internet access had free access to
almost any piece of recorded music at near- or identical quality to
the products of the publishers' copies. Moreover the process of
acquiring music copies using internet filesharing was faster and more
convenient than the traditional vehicles offered by publishers.

The structure of the computer networks which make up the internet are
by design decentralised and fault-tolerant, and as such top-down
control or restriction of internet activities is very difficult. This
is further compounded by its transnational nature, which renders
national legislation on acceptable uses largely ineffective, as one
may simply access the desired material on a computer in a country
which has no such legal restrictions. Thus we get the well-known quote
by John Gilmore: "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes
around it." While early filesharing networks such as Napster were
centralised and hence could be easily shut down by stopping a few
computers, most are now designed to take advantage of the
decentralised nature of the internet, and thus remain active
regardless of the status of any particular computer in the network.


Filesharing: Individuals
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The first point to note regarding the practises of individuals is the
enormous popularity of filesharing as a means of acquiring recordings
of music. Despite appeals and threats from music publishers the usage
of filesharing networks is commonplace among those comfortable with
technology. Included among these are many artists signed to record
labels, though many others reject filesharing citing reliance on a
business model which would be undermined by their doing so.

The importance within filesharing networks of making newly downloaded
music available for at least a few days is very frequently emphasised,
though technically it's very rarely enforced (not least because it's
very difficult technically to do - as the networks have been
engineered from the ground-up to facilitate the free copying of data).
The process of only keeping a downloaded file available until one's
own download is complete and then immediately removing access to
others is strongly frowned upon, and referred to as 'leeching'.

Some commentators have suggested that such emphases can lead one to
fruitfully consider treating filesharing as a gift economy (Barbrook
1998), but as Zerva (2008: 16) points out, the typically very diffuse,
vague and anonymous social connections between exchange partners
renders such a frame of analysis inappropriate. 

That copyright law is being broken is very widely known by
participants, but evidently is not regarded as a valid reason to
change their habits. Indeed many who are more deeply involved in the
filesharing community have vocally opposed (with varying degrees of
sophistication) current copyright regimes as inappropriate and
inapplicable in the era of the internet.

Probably the largest and best organised of such opposition groups call
themselves the 'free culture' movement. Inspired heavily by the 'free
software' movement before them, at the centre of their beliefs are
that it is an ethical imperative to allow the sharing of digital work,
and in many cases also explicitly allow others to use one's work in
their own creations. This is accomplished through a series of
copyright licences (this again is an innovation first used in the free
software movement, by which one allows redistribution of a work
providing certain conditions are met.), the most popular of which are
produced by the Creative Commons foundation, and allow several choices
as to how one's work may be used. Some of these licenses, referred to
as 'share-alike' licenses by creative commons, and more broadly as
'copyleft' licenses, actively encourage the sharing of a work, by
allowing one to modify or incorporate the work into their own work
however they choose, providing that the resultant work is also
released under the same sharable license. This effectively turns
copyright law on its head, and has hence been described as "a form of
intellectual jujitsu." (Williams 2002)


Filesharing: The Publishing Industry
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The response from the music publishers was unsurprisingly less
enthusiastic. After cutting the head off Napster only to find a
hundred new networks spring up, the publishers started an aggressive
campaign to sell the idea that music recordings ought to be treated as
any physical commodity, and moreover that copying a recording was no
different to stealing from a shop. Indeed the rhetoric of 'stealing'
and 'theft' was employed a great deal by the industry, in an attempt
to ensure that any discussion of filesharing would be framed in terms
implying that recordings were no different from physical items.

When it became clear that a significant number of people were not
swayed by their advertisements, and filesharing networks were
technically nigh-impossible to dismantle, the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA), soon followed by the British
Phonographic Industry (BPI), started the highly controversial practise
of suing individuals who made their copies available on filesharing
networks for copyright infringement. With estimates of numbers of
people sharing copyrighted material reaching the millions it was clear
that the lawsuits were not intended to directly target each individual
offender, but rather scare enough people into stopping to make the
filesharing networks less attractive and useful. Indeed it appears
that industry hoped that by targeting prolific 'seeders' (that is
people who share a large amount of content) they would change the
economic situation to one in which the best path for the individual
(according to classical game-theory) would be to only download what
they needed and share as little as possible, hence initiating the
conditions for a tragedy of the commons type scenario. Thus far
however such tactics have primarily served to provoke resentment
towards the industry, thus for many adding the motivation of fighting
a system seen as destructive.

Industry groups have also lobbied for and won significantly more
stringent copyright laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) in the USA and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) in
the European Union. One of the major features of such laws is to make
the breaking of copy-protection measures on digital copies illegal.
Copy-protection is as mentioned above a very difficult thing to
institute on computers, whose basic design is to copy data. As such
the recording industry found that any copy protection scheme they
added to their copies was quickly dismantled, so they turned instead
to the courts in an attempt to dissuade people from breaking the
protection measures. These too appear to have done little to stop the
breaking of copy-protection, but have further incensed and solidified
many against the recording industry and their lobbyists.

In their public statements recording industry bodies have repeatedly
appealed to the need to buy copies only from publishers, as otherwise
musicians can not be paid. Leaving aside debates about the percentage
of profits which major record publishers pass on to their musicians,
in repeatedly justifying their position as enabling musicians to be
paid they strongly implied that no other business model was possible.
Therefore, the argument went, if one wanted a society with full-time
musicians there was no choice but to treat recorded music as a
commodity and reject filesharing.

Such lack of imagination from the record publishers is not very
surprising, as conservatism towards new technologies is entirely
natural, and of course they have a great vested interest in the system
as it existed before (Mokyr 2002: 220). However a large variety of
alternative business models have been suggested by others which
attempt to work with the new features of recorded music on the
computer network, rather than against them, and as such become more
profitable the more music is shared (at zero cost). Suggestions
include various donation / microdonation schemes, embedded
advertising, and using recordings as a loss-leader for live
performances and merchandise.


Analysis
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Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) argued that the 'culture industry'
represented a major homogenising and pacifying force to culture, thus
for the first time in history neutralising the power of art to
"protest against the petrified relations under which people lived"
(Adorno 1991: 2) and thus ensuring the continuance of the existing
system of inequality. Moreover, they claimed, the power of the
industry was inescapable, as it tended to subsume and pacify elements
of protest and define the frame of cultural discussion, as well as by
more direct means such as wielding massive top-down power over the
processes of production and distribution.

The argument follows that the primary role of the culture industry is
to keep all members of society accepting of the political and economic
systems of inequality - or at least too apathetic to do anything about
them. Its role then was largely to facilitate the smooth running of
other major areas of repression, with which its leaders are intimately
connected (Adorno & Horkheimer 1972: 4).

However if this were the case one would have expected the 'culture
industry' to respond very positively to the phenomenon of filesharing,
as it allowed for the far wider and easier dissemination of the
normative ideologies embedded within their recordings. After all,
while such technology makes it easy for any copy of music to be widely
distributed regardless of source, in practise a significant majority
of copies available were originally produced by the 'culture
industry.' (Sterne 2006: 831)

One must therefore conclude that while the wellbeing of the wider
systems of power may well be an agenda of the culture industry, of
higher priority is its own profitability.

A point that should be emphasised is the political power which the
music industry still wields. In being the source for the majority of
music in a culture, with its inevitable ideological payload, the
influence the industry has on the minds of listeners is still
enormously significant, regardless of whether they continue to enjoy a
monopoly over distribution.

Kopytoff (1986) defines commodity in opposition to the singular.
Copies of music on a filesharing network could then be considered
perfect commodities. However using the calculation of exchange value
based upon the level of sacrifice necessary to acquire a copy one sees
the exchange value drop to zero, (Zerva 2008: 14) in which case copies
could be considered to fall well outside of the realm of commodities,
which at their core are tradeable.

What such definitional confusion flags up is the inappropriateness of
trying to fit music copying into categories of commodity, which were
created for items with quite different economic properties. In
particular, the meaning of exchange - of voluntarily losing access to
one thing in order to gain access to another - is changed, as in the
world of the computer network one need not lose access to anything in
order to gain access to another.

So if exchange value drops to zero for recorded music in the age of
filesharing, how may one determine relative value? An easy answer is
to turn instead to use value, that is the value derived by each
individual of actually listening to the music recording. Obviously
then values will differ for each listener, which is no problem as
value-judgements are no longer necessary for successful exchange.

One could then argue, as Sterne suggests (2006: 831), that music
before recording technologies were available was valued according to
the effect on an individual upon listening, that is to say on use
value. As recorded music became easily available, tied up in physical
items tied to the wider market, music was valued more in terms of
exchange. And now as filesharing once more removes music from the
realm of the market by virtue of changing the rules of its exchange,
focus again is on use value. A somewhat analogous process is claimed
by proponents of free software, where the process of decommoditisation
is seen as "more about clearing away a temporary confusion, than it is
about some strange and amazing departure that's suddenly occurred."
(Moglen 2007)

One should take care not to overstate the ephemeral nature of digital
copies of recorded music. Sterne points to the continuance of
collecting and stockpiling more music than one is able to listen to as
evidence of a sense of ownership and possession of one's music files,
in the same was that one does in the case of physical objects.
(2006: 831-832)

Determining the extent to which the new technology associated with
filesharing is a factor behind new political ideas is of course
impossible, but one may usefully discuss the political tendencies
embedded in the technologies.

Earlier distribution technologies had quite different qualities. For
example the limited bandwidth available to over-the-air transmissions
(e.g. radio and television) made the establishment of a governing body
to decide who could broadcast on which frequency (if at all) quite
necessary and natural. Decisions about how to make such choices often
involved money, and as such large entrenched interests had another
advantage over smaller organisations in doing business and spreading
their particular viewpoints over the airwaves. The decentralisation
and allowance for modular growth offered by the internet has
significantly reduced the need for such a governing body. Of course
many argue that stronger governance of the internet is important, the
difference being that it is not necessary to the successful
functioning of the network as a whole. Recent discussion of laws
regarding 'network neutrality' however illustrate the limits of such a
view, as most people connect to the internet via an internet service
provider, who *could* artificially alter the operation of parts of the
network to their customers.

Central to general computing, compression technology and computer
networking has long been the striving for faster copying of anything
digital, utterly regardless of concepts such as property rights over
certain digital data. As Sterne puts it "The primary, illegal uses of
the mp3 are not aberrant uses or an error in the technology; they are
its highest moral calling ... These are the instructions encoded into
the very form of the mp3." (2006: 839) However one needs to be careful
with such statements, as they tend to carry an air of technological
determinism which denies individuals agency and ignores instances of
difference.

When disembodied from their physical forms and instead made to take
digital forms, ideas of copyright and commodity have often been
questioned. The first industry to be exposed to the power of computer
networks as a distribution and indeed creation channel was computer
programming, which was the sphere in which the radical take of
copyright 'copyleft' (see above) was envisioned. The place of software
was reconsidered and concluded not to lie in the commodity realm, but
somewhere quite different: "The technological information about the
terms on which we and the 'digital brains' exist: that's not a
product. That's a culture." (Moglen 2007)

In many quarters the same is now being said about music, and the place
of the record publishing industry is being recast by those engaged in
file-sharing, from the purveyors of culture to an entity which seeks
to profit by restricting access to a shared culture.


Works Cited
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- Adorno, T (1991) 'Culture Industry Reconsidered' The Culture
  Industry: selected essays on mass culture (Adorno, T), London: Routledge
- Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M (1972) 'The Culture Industry:
  enlightenment as mass deception' Dialectic of Enlightenment (ed.
  Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M), New York: Continuum
- Benjamin, W (1936) 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
  Reproduction' Illuminations (Benjamin, W) London: Pimlico
- Barbrook, R (1998) [The Hi-Tech Gift Economy](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552),
  First Monday 3: 12
- Kopytoff, I (1986) 'The Cultural Biography of Things:
  Commoditization as Process' The Social Life of Things
  (ed. Appadurai, A), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Moglen, E (2001) [Liberation Musicology](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010312/moglen),
  The Nation: March 12
- Moglen, E (2007) [How I discovered Free Software and met RMS](http://www.linux.com/feature/114303),
  Linux.com interview
- Mokyr, J (2002) The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the
  Knowledge Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press
- Sterne, J (2006) The mp3 as cultural artifact, New Media & Society,
  California: Sage
- Williams, S (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for
  Free Software, California: O'Reilly Media
- Zerva, K (2008) File-Sharing versus Gift-Giving: a Theoretical
  Approach, Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Internet
  and Web Applications and Services