I love how this story weaves the changes of an industry around a single life who anticipated, benefited, and eventually fell behind the trends of how we get music, movies, and media. I still remember buying bootleg "VCDs" in Hong Kong back in 2001.
When it comes to how the music industry's changed as a whole, I think two charts tell the story:
1. RIAA-tracked (North American) music sales have fallen from a high of $14 billion in 1999 to only about $6 billion today, even with downloads included. [1]
2. At the same time, concert ticket sales have gone up from $1.5 to $7.5 billion, offsetting three-quarters of the drop in music sales. [2]
It's an incredible shift in how the industry works, and explains the rise of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Spotify (why are music publishers and others are more willing to give away music?). The winners and losers have changed, but the music keeps playing.
I remember how people on Slashdot loved to argue about this around 2003, when the RIAA started suing everyone. The nerds claimed that music would eventually become free, but artists would still make a living from concert tickets and merchandise. That viewpoint was often mocked, but turned out to be right!
Funny, concerts and recitals is how artists have made their money since the dawn of time. Hard work but it still beat being a farmer in the field all day.
The orgies and coke in studios-age was just an anomaly.
No, the nerds argued that music "should" be free and that musicians "should just" switch to a concert/merch business model. Which they ended up having to do. I think thats a very different view of it. I'm not a musician or otherwise profit from strong copyrights, but I still think creators were/are being robbed.
As a nerd, my argument isn't so much a "moral" one as a practical one. We have general purpose computers, so by definition anything that's pure data (such as music, videos, books, etc) is a commodity that's infinitely reproducible for virtually no cost (which is also incidentally why owning personal data should be considered a liability rather than an asset).
Now, legally it's a lot more complicated than that. But those are all artificial complications that don't mesh with the reality of data on computers. And the law is going to continue to struggle to enforce previous-millenium models of commerce and will ultimately fail not because it's morally bad or anything, but simply because it doesn't fit the reality of computing.
It seems to me that the "new" model of commerce will actually revert to patronage. Creators get paid up front to create something, after which they revoke control of it. This way they get their fair share without needing to struggle against the inevitable sharing of their content.
Another way it could go is that all consumer devices are manufactured for specific applications rather than as general purpose computers. But I don't see that being realistic since the genie's already out of the bottle. People know how to build computers and there's no way to globally stop manufacturing of the components. Even only producing entertainment for specific hardware is unlikely to work, since if it works on one machine it can probably be translated to work on a computer as well.
> [...]but I still think creators were/are being robbed.
Sure, they are. By the recording companies.
The argument we, nerds, made at the time is that with that model of content creation and distribution artists were still getting most of their income from concerts, so ideally they could move to a self-publishing model or even give their music for free and still retain most of their income.
I don't know how familiar you are with the music industry, but the amount of money a musician gets (or used to get, I've been decades away from that business) is usually cents per album sold. You get 100K sales? Congratulations, that's a massive achievement, here's your $5K. To share among all the band members. Off you go.
Don't take my word for it, either, read a few interviews with Trent Reznor in the early 00's, for example, when he left the music label he was with and moved to self-publishing (which he was almost doing anyway), here's one where he talks about this head on:
It turns out that the internet is a great tool for new musicians to advertise themselves, you have plenty of places that allow you to upload your stuff for free and selling your music is easier now than ever. Of course it requires a set of new skills (a bit of marketing, sales, technical know-how) but on the whole, you have more control and less strings attached than with a record label. Very few people buy physical media any more, so most of the advantages of signing with a company (production, sales, distribution, logistics...) are gone anyway.
And that's the beauty of this: Recording labels are still a viable businesses, they can still offer services the musicians and fans need, all we said is that the balance of power had to shift from the power ties in the offices earning millions to the musicians actually making the stuff.
Creators were being robbed long before the Internet came along and made piracy easy, yo. The music industry is literally filled with some of the most heinous, double-crossing hustlers you will ever find.
This subject might go underappreciated, but it's so very true. A very shallow search will lead you to the ugliest, and most scathing accounts by some of the most beloved musicians. (see Michael Jackson)
Others have simply long left the sole clutches of major labels and only associate with them on their own terms, like Wilco and Radiohead (in the rock/ish world).
That said I feel like adding to the general discussion here—with radio music became more accessible to the masses than it ever had been, and in that era musicians largely made their money on royalties (if they were so fortunate) or putting on a roadshow.
Shortly thereafter was it only that people were able to take portable recordings home to enjoy at their own timing.
Prior to any of this, (decently) paid musicians were far fewer. If anyone wanted to enjoy music, they had to afford concerts or recitals, visit or encounter travelling musicians, or acquire the music itself and learn to play it.
I digress a little... but it seems we're coming sort of full-circle from the radio-era model back to it via the streaming-era model. The major difference being the need to not only buy a device to tune in, but to pay an additional and regular fee to access more content/programming than the radio provides.
Before we had recording technology, the business opportunity didn't exist. Sometimes, opportunities only exist as long as the technology is workable, and eventually become unworkable when the technology is democratized and commoditized enough.
Would I be correct in guessing that you believe creators should financially benefit from copyrights for moral and ethical reasons? I.e., that it's morally correct for those who created a work to financially profit from it the most, and that any system that gets in the way of this is some form of robbery?
That makes sense to me. Our digital music distribution system is stupid to begin with. We shouldn't be paying for digital goods per item. We should be using alternate payment methods. Unfortunately, this is bad news for the RIAA, as they lose out on a large pool of profits because we've automated the distribution problem away.
The patreon/kickstarter model is much better, but the issue with that from the industry's perspective is that it pays artists more or less directly from their fanatical core of devoted fans. You see this model at work on Twitch as well, where a small group of "subscribers" can support a stream that is viewed by the much larger group of followers.
The reason the industry doesn't like it is it requires fanatical fans. It doesn't fit with a model of bland, mass-appeal content; the kind of stuff that everyone likes but nobody loves.
You still need to build up that fanbase somehow. So many _pieces_ of the industry infrastructure may yet have a place (agents, financing, mentorship, hustling, whatever), but yeah definitely the sun is setting on the old-school business of "getting signed" as being the big goal for an artist looking to go big.
All that caused is a big shift in income from record labels to venues and concert promoters, the artists did not end up any better off than they were before.
I've always heard (no proof) that artists make little off album and song sales but received a larger benefit from concerts/merch. -- If that's true, the shift to increased concert revenue benefits them.
There's almost as big a racket around venues and concert promoters as there was with RIAA and it's ilk (it's basically a Ticketmaster/LiveNation monopoly in the U.S.), but artists do get a larger cut (harder to scam them when they see the full stadium I guess).
I've seen quotes about 60% of gross for artists with the rest being split between the ticket processor, promoter, taxes, etc. That 60% has to cover the artists' costs (not the venue but roadies, sound engineers, lighting crew, catering, tour manager, backing singers, extra musicians, dancers and so on
I wonder how much of the ticket market increase comes not from increased volume but from outlandishly increased prices and "convenience" fees tacked on.
this was already happening in asia back in the 90s. artists were shifting from selling cds (which were heavily pirated) to touring, which also garnered them more money.
obviously hindsight is 20/20 but there were tons of articles pointing out what was happening in asia was going to happen here whether the record companies in the west liked it or not.
> From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music.
I love reading a long-after-the-fact story when a key person is willing to talk. Had this story been written in 2001, it would have been speculation and hype. We wouldn't have learned about the real people and how and why they did it.
I'm looking forward to reading the following around a decade from now:
(1) The real story behind Satoshi Nakamoto, his true name and motives, and why he went silent.
(2) The Truecrypt author's story, who was he really, and what caused him to disavow his creation 3 years ago even though it appears totally secure even today.
One of the sad things is that people willing to just get a no-nonsense DRM-free MP3 of a years-old song they like for personal use (and sharing with a friend perhaps) are considered the same with those willing to get and even sell original stuff before it's even released.
The "dawn" of online piracy was in the 70s and 80s with BBSs and Usenet, way before Napster. Even right before we had Napster, we had IRC as mentioned in the article.
Napster was more like the beginning of peak online piracy. Then we had all the Napster knock-offs for 10 years. Piracy pretty much lost mainstream appeal after that with the emergence of legal media streaming services.
Data sharing technologies disrupted the media market in the same way that ride sharing technologies disrupted the taxi market. Its piratical uses are secondary to the fact that analog information had been largely outmoded by digital information as early as the first BBS.
The piracy, "concert/merch" model, as well as the success of Bandcamp and Spotify, are adaptations to changes in the infrastructure for information exchange.
However, anyone arguing that music, movies, or code "should be free" probably hasn't played a guitar, acted in a play, or written a block. Doing these things well is not easy and takes a lifetime of almost-daily practice and expertise...consider resuming that argument when the world is post-currency.
That was pretty cool to read. I always like hearing about the ways a few people can influence something so widespread. I remember reading a few RNS .NFO files back in the day. I've still got an old hard drive kicking around somewhere that probably has a few of those old .mp3 scene releases in its belly. Back from the days when it used to take longer to download an album of shitty quality .mp3 files than it does to download a 4k movie today.
And of course you can use a VPN, but what will happen if fewer people seed? Or if everybody moves to a VPN, and anti-piracy contractors start targeting VPN providers?
Ah, Germany, or how to use public resources to protect private IP. The French decided it's not worth their time. There are more important issues for the police to pursue, like organized crime.
You can't block torrent. You can perhaps block individual DNS entries, but as long as traffic can flow between "random" ip addresses, torrent will exist.
I wish ALL companies distributed their software through torrents. I live in Venezuela and my ISPs throttle each connection, they're also slow and unstable. Bittorrent gets around all this by giving me the ability to resume and leech through dozens or even hundreds of parallel connections.
I've actually had to download pirated copies of Microsoft software that they freely provide as downloads. They offer direct downloads but don't let me use download managers... Long slow downloads always fail for me.
And that is just Venezuela. I know Iranians have exactly the same problems and I'm sure many others do.
I remember my university had to make special exceptions to the network for the WoW and LoL patchers. A few students figured out how to spoof their torrents to look like the LoL patcher in order to torrent on campus. Not really that wise though since your network access was tied to your student credentials.
This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it.
There's not some "guy" responsible for online piracy, and there wasn't a "dawn". If Napster hadn't existed something else would have. Piracy existed outside of Napster. Napster did not give birth to piracy. Piracy has been huge since removable storage was invented, whether it was data cassettes or floppy disks. Piracy was in demand and Napster was the answer, not the inspiration.
Considering the source, The New Yorker, none of this comes as a surprise.
I think the article addressed those points rather well. It highlighted the fact that Glover wasn't the only one doing these things, but his unique position made him a supplier for one of the more exclusive pirating clubs.
The author did a rather good job tying a few story lines together coherently to portray a few of the human interest stories at the heart of the piracy movement. Is the headline and top subject a little grandiose? Sure, but the heart of the article didn't claim that Glover was the only supplier of the pirated records, only that he was the supplier for one of the clubs that typically leaked the records first.
No. This wasn't an article about one person making piracy possible. It told a story of few individuals who, on their behalf, brought the music available to the scene. And how the music got from scene's inner circles to the public.
Considering the number of releases the group released and the much of the blockbuster albums were supplied by the main protagonist, it is hard to argue that his and their actions weren't significant.
Napster is mentioned only as a first easy to use tool for giving the mainstream an access to the goods pirates were releasing.
hey chill, i dont think its garbage. I detected no technical errors in this article. Napster did have an effect, but this article isnt about that, its about the RNS crew, who released so much stolen music in the 00s.
Its from the book "How Music Got Free", and probably has more details you are after.
That Napster is depicted as a footnote is pretty inaccurate, considering the title. Paint his story as the story of a kingpin, but this is not "the dawn of" anything beyond his personal tale.
>This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it.
When it comes to how the music industry's changed as a whole, I think two charts tell the story:
1. RIAA-tracked (North American) music sales have fallen from a high of $14 billion in 1999 to only about $6 billion today, even with downloads included. [1]
2. At the same time, concert ticket sales have gone up from $1.5 to $7.5 billion, offsetting three-quarters of the drop in music sales. [2]
It's an incredible shift in how the industry works, and explains the rise of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Spotify (why are music publishers and others are more willing to give away music?). The winners and losers have changed, but the music keeps playing.
[1] https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...