Dear RIAA, Your Music is Worthless

Everyone I know under the age of 40 downloads music, movies, and/or software illegally. File-sharing is a worldwide phenomenon which shows no sign of abating. Is our entire generation morally bankrupt? Is anonymity all it takes to turn any one of us into a criminal?

Well, maybe, but that’s another blog post. The huge numbers of illegal downloads represent the invisible hand of the market forcing the price of digital media down. This is not surprising when you consider that the intrinsic value of music, movies, and software has dropped enormously in the last two decades and yet content distributors cling stubbornly to obscene profit margins.

The success of iTunes was due in no small part to Jobs' insistence on offering a significantly better deal than the standard album purchase. At first the record labels balked at Jobs' new price point, and within a few years they had acquiesced to what was previously unthinkable: offering DRM-free audio tracks for download. In the face of the public’s rapidly deteriorating perception of the value of digital music, they had no choice.

Today there are still many people willing to pay $.99 a song, but every day more and more are deciding that free is a better price. The big secret the RIAA doesn’t want you to know is that this isn’t really a bad thing for anyone but them. The argument you commonly hear from industry groups that artists will stop creating is ludicrous. For every artist upset with widespread music piracy there are countless others willingly giving away their music, just happy for the publicity.

Is the latest Dixie Chicks CD really worth $20 while similar music from lesser-known artists is worth nothing? Are there no indie artists producing music of the same caliber? I’ll leave that for the reader to decide, but I think we can all agree that value is ultimately determined by what people are willing to pay. Therefore, if no one is willing to pay for a digital download, it isn’t worth anything. No amount of legislation or prosecution of college students will change that harsh economic reality.

Technological advancements bring major changes to industry. It is not uncommon for jobs to be lost in the process and for entire ways of life to be disrupted. Craftsmen found themselves out of work after the industrial revolution and many banded together to set fire to the machines which had taken their jobs; not so unlike the RIAA targeting file-sharing networks today. There is no denying that the process can be ugly, but this type of progress is good for human race in the long run.

Copyright law has always been nonsensical and now it has become unenforceable. This is not the end of human creativity as the RIAA would have you believe. Nothing could be further from the truth: what we are witnessing is the dawn of a new age where the lines between artist and consumer will blur. You can see it unfolding around you in the new “social” web and its scores of bloggers, in the powerful open-source programming languages like Python available to the masses free of charge, and in the studio-quality recordings aspiring artists are able to produce in their bedrooms on budget equipment.

The only people who need fear this coming revolution are those who profit from the system without adding any value. Record labels no longer provide a vital service to the industry and the market will force them to adopt a business model that does or eventually face bankruptcy. Industrious organizations and individuals who find innovative ways to add value to this new marketplace will find themselves amply compensated for their efforts, as always:

• Artists will still be able to collect a premium for live performances, and all but the superstars will appreciate the larger audiences that simpler, more direct distribution methods will bring. Many artists, such as Trent Reznor and Radiohead, have already realized this and are more than eager to shake off parasites like the RIAA.

• The open source community has already shown us with Linux that free software can outperform its proprietary rivals. Video game makers will provide value-added services, namely multiplayer servers, to enable them to continue to develop expensive games and still turn a profit afterwards.

• Movie studios will be forced to find new ways to monetize their creations. Services like Netflix and Hulu have already begun to pave the way in this arena.

• Other content creators will also have to find ways to add value to the new marketplace or perish. News organization are struggling to stay afloat as they are able to charge less and less for their once-prime advertising space.

The means to produce professional quality creative works are no longer prohibitively expensive and thus available only to a select few. Large conglomerates no longer hold the keys to the only means of content distribution. This has led to a massive increase in society's artistic output, and the value of digital media has dropped accordingly.