In the music business, decade belonged to fans

By Greg Kot | December 29, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

“It’s up to you” — so said Radiohead when fans clicked to download the band’s “In Rainbows” album from its Web site in 2007.

Radiohead had become the equivalent of the busker on the street corner, playing for tips.

But as one of the biggest bands in the world, Radiohead also was posing a question: “What’s music worth?”

That was the decade’s signature moment in pop music, a sign that fans — once a faceless marketing demographic — were now de facto distributors, marketers, publicists and co-conspirators.

Previous decades were dominated by personalities and movements, larger-than-life figures such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles, and cultural shifts such as hip-hop, rave music and punk. But the 2000s belonged to music technology and delivery systems. Most of all, the decade belonged to fans.

The combination of broadband Internet access and file-trading software such as Napster seized power and control over music from a handful of corporations and transferred it to the laptops and cell phones of consumers. Since 2000, the industry has seen its business cut by one-third to less than $10 billion annually, while compact disc sales have been chopped in half, to fewer than 500 million annually.

Though sales of digital music have increased, those gains are far outweighed by rogue peer-to-peer file-trading networks. Web-tracking services estimate that for every digital file that is sold, 40 are traded in violation of U.S. copyright law.

Even as massive judgments were awarded to the music industry in highly publicized copyright infringement trials against Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum, jurists noted the inadequacy of 20th- century copyright law in addressing the new digital reality. Though a jury ultimately awarded the record industry $1.92 million in damages because Thomas-Rasset was found to have made 24 copyrighted music files available on her home computer, she “acted like countless other Internet users,” U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said. “Her alleged acts were illegal but common.”

Intellectual property that consumers covet certainly is worth something — as Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” marketing strategy implied. Yet the industry is hardly blameless in the shift to illegal file-sharing. As consumers made their desires clear by shifting from physical product to digital music, important catalogs such as the Beatles and AC/DC still can’t be purchased from legitimate music stores such as Apple’s iTunes. But fans can download the songs of any band through countless black- market sites; indeed, just about any song you can possibly think of is a mouse click away, for free.

As recently as a decade ago, it could take the dedicated fan months to track down obscure releases. Now they can be found in a matter of seconds, turning music into the cultural equivalent of tap water or oxygen. More music is more accessible to more people than ever, and yet that very ubiquity makes it feel somehow less essential.

Music fans hang on to their portable music players, the iPod in particular, rather than the music they hold.

They collect music and then dispose of it, certain they can replace it with a few mouse clicks.