Other musicians fear for their livelihood. Even radical culture jammers
Negativland, who have made a career out of appropriating the music of such
icons as U2 while championing the broadest interpretation of "fair use,"
fear they may be left behind. While Negativland member Mark Hosler
proclaims his allegiance to "anything that cuts out the middlemen and
parasites," he worries about what online distribution can do to a band
that sells only several thousand copies of even critically acclaimed
albums. "It m eans the big guys are going to get smaller, the medium guys
are going to get little, the little guys are going to get teeny, and a
whole lot of people at the bottom are going to drop off altogether."
Musical consumption will soon no longer be restricted to discretely
packaged songs and albums. Eventually it will become possible to download
music quickly into players with memory that can accommodate hundreds of
hours' worth of material. Will MP3 kill the CD star and take down the
record industry with it? Ice-T imagines a day when an artist simply can't
earn a living from making records. "Maybe that's just the way life is
gonna go," he says. "Maybe the way we'll make money in the future is
through live performances." No wonder the Big Five, which currently
control 90% of all recorded music, fear for their jobs. "We want our stuff
to be protected, but we don't feel the problem is as big as the majors try
to make it seem,"says Ice-T. "They're really more afraid of everybody
popping up with their own labels."
So what about the industry's secure digital-music initiative, which
aims to control the illegal distribution of music? "Thirty seconds left,
six touchdowns down and they're screaming at the referee," laughs Chuck D,
who, like Ice-T, claims the piracy issue is just a smoke screen for the
Big Five's fear that the proliferation of online record labels will dilute
their market domination. "It won't eradicate the majors or the indies," he
says, "but it will force them to share the marketplace with maybe a mill
ion artists and half a million labels." Call it cultural Darwinism, and
may the best bands win.
