Sign O the times – Why the internet is completely over

So its official, “The internet is over”.  Pop legend Prince (a.k.a Love Symbol #2, a.k.a. The artist formerly known as Prince) has called it.  The future of music distribution is giving away free albums with the weekend rags.  See that coming?  No, me neither.

The internet is dead, long live the internet!

Unless you’ve been living in a cave on Mars you will probably have noticed a bit of commotion in the music industry, which is claiming that online piracy is killing them to the tune of £400m a year in the UK alone.  Prince is obviously feeling the pinch too and has taken decisive action, talking to the Daily Mirror from his 70,000 square foot home/recording studio/night club/concert hall/chocolate factory he says:  “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.” He then goes on to say:  “The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.  They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”  Profound stuff.

In the last decade, digital music distribution has really taken off on both sides of the law.  Napster kicked things of in 1999 with the first online file sharing service, paving the way for peer to peer sharing, torrenting and a technological game of cat and mouse with the music industry.  Meanwhile, legitimate services like iTunes lead the way for a host of services like Spotify, Last.fm, Pandora and, weirdly, Napster in its second incarnation.  But instead of embracing the technology and driving the development of services that people want to use, the music industry has concentrated on suing music enthusiasts, incidentally, leaving the door open for Apple and other digital players to seize the digital distribution market.  Seeing what was happening to their business, the music industry decided to skirt the confusion of dealing with these baffling technology companies and continue the policing of their customers.  After years of fiercely lobbying the government, a digital economy act was rushed through at the end of the last parliament which will basically force the major ISPs to police their networks for illegal file transfers then warn and finally cut off the culprits.  Music industry 1, people of the free world 0.

I think it’s good to look at all this in historical context.  Up until the beginning of the 20^th century, music only came one way – live.  In the old days, wandering minstrels would follow people around teasing them with music, then you’d have classical recitals and travelling bands and sometimes normal people would just get out instruments and play music together!  Then with the invention of the phonograph and the wireless telegraph, the “music industry” was born.  Over the decades it grew and evolved into the drug-fuelled league of super humans we now know as pop and rock stars.   Rock stars lived like gods doing what they liked, record label fat cats throttled the industry for all it was worth and consumers rushed down to Our Price every Saturday to spend £15.99 on the latest album.  The threat of piracy was technologically limited to taping the top 40 off the radio or your close friends.  Happy times.

Personally I think the whole system needed a good shake up, the big musical genres were all spent and the most interesting music was coming out of the underground.  Now, thanks to the internet, we have more artists making more music, more collaborations, more ways to listen, we can hold our entire music collection in the palm of our hand or stream it across thin air.

As for piracy, I believe all artists deserve a living, and their success should be reflected justly in this, though I think the heady days of excess are behind us, we have moved on and I think that’s good.  In terms of what is good for the music industry then I think a little piracy is okay. Being able to explore and try out music without committing to buying something you later decide is rubbish is really useful and will usually lead to new fans buying the music, merchandise and going to gigs.  There will always be a handful of people that take the ****, but generally people are willing to pay for something they really like.  If anything, it shows that the system isn’t giving the consumers what they want how they want it, and with today’s digital technology you can’t fold your arms and say ‘tough cheddar’ because they will just go around you.

Anyway, I’m off to buy my copy of the Daily Mirror and get my free Prince album.

Image courtesy of kyz, some rights reserved