Art Watch – September 7, 2003 – MP3s Are Not the Devil – The Ornery American
Orson Scott Card explains how owning a record label is a better way to get rich than actually playing music . . . .
The irony is that we’ve played out this whole scenario before, more than once. When radio first started broadcasting records instead of live performances, the music publishing industry became livid. This was going to hurt sales!
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Same thing with TV and movies. Yes, TV wiped out the B-movie market segment and it killed newsreels — but it opened up a lucrative aftermarket that kept movies alive long after they would have stopped earning money.
[ . . . . ]
The internet is similar, but not identical, to these situations.
First, most of the people who are getting those free MP3s would not be buying the CDs anyway. They’re doing this in order to get far more music than they can actually afford. That means that if they weren’t sharing MP3s online, they would simply have less music — or share CDs hand to hand. It does not mean that they would have bought CDs to get the tunes they’re downloading from Napster-like sharing schemes.
I have suspected as much: while I sympathize with people’s gripes about $18.99 CDs (it sure doesn’t encourage me to buy any), I have assumed a lot of file-sharing activity was just a way of listening to music without paying for it.