The decade in music
In a business previously dominated by personalities and movements, this decade belonged to the fans

By Greg Kot

Tribune Newspapers Critic

December 22, 2009

"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."

Copyright holders have reason to gripe. Intellectual property that consumers covet is certainly 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 like 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.

Just about everything (except for maybe the latest "American Idol" star) feels smaller, more niche. The age of the Beatles, U2 and Madonna -- the all-encompassing global superstar -- is in decline. Within this fragmented culture, in which every movement no matter how obscure has its own Web site and cult following, great music still is being made. Communities of listeners are sprouting up for countless styles of music and tiny underground explosions of creativity that in past decades wouldn't have stood a chance of getting noticed. There's hope for the little guy and gal who can't get a deal with one of the major labels.

But the question remains, what's the music worth? It leads to more riddles: How will content creators get paid, and by whom? Who will decide what constitutes legal file sharing? Can the notion of an Internet that is democratic co-exist with 20th century copyright law?

Now all industries that depend on intellectual property for revenue -- movies, television, books, video, newspapers, magazines -- face a similar crisis. As this anxious decade comes to a close, we are no closer to a definitive solution, a new business model, than we were at its chaotic start.

But Radiohead's approach suggested that the very notion of an all-encompassing business model may be outmoded. It's not a one-size-fits-all world anymore.

greg@gregkot.com

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