Free Entertainment Waiting For You

By Thomas R. Wiles
Truckers Connection

1/15/2008

As technology has changed over the years, music has been delivered to the end consumer in a number of different ways.

Before the invention of mechanical devices capable of playing back music, the only way to hear music was to hear it being played live. Sheet music was sold, and professional musicians were paid to play.

The invention of the player piano spawned a huge controversy over copyright issues. Sound familiar?

Musician’s unions were upset because a single piano performance could be replicated thousands of times. Some people actually bought player pianos for home use. In-home singing accompanied by a player piano was once a not-uncommon form of entertainment. In the 1920s, pretty much every pianist of note was called in to create player piano rolls. The then-new technology of the player piano spawned more opportunity for musicians to sell their music, not less opportunity as had been feared. Player piano sales peaked in the 1920s, but quickly died off with the invention of the electric phonograph.

The electric phonograph along with radio played a huge part in the development of the music industry. At every stage of new technology making its way into the marketplace, existing people involved in the industry dragged their feet. In the end, every new technological development ended up resulting in larger sales—a striking pattern emerges if you study the history of these devices. Radio and later television created their own controversies. Radio ended up being complimentary to the music business, spawning sales of billions of dollars worth of pre-recorded music. The music business sailed along for a number of years. Then came the invention of the audio cassette recorder—at first, the industry responded by trying to outlaw home recording devices and later by trying to put a tax on blank tapes. Sound familiar? People were copying their vinyl records and later compact discs to tape, and even trading these copies with their friends.

Once the industry got wise and started selling pre-recorded audiocassettes, music sales increased. When home video recording came on the scene via VHS and Betamax, similar legal challenges were made by the movie industry. In the end, the movie industry ended up selling pre-recorded movies on VHS, Beta, and later DVDs, vastly increasing their overall sales.

The introduction of the compact disc was resisted by some in the music industry because for the first time they were selling a perfect copy of the music. Once CDs caught on, overall music sales increased yet again. In the 1990s, the public Internet grew in a big way. By 2000, people were using peer-to-peer file sharing networking software and websites like the old Napster to trade MP3 music files. The rock band Metallica started a big lawsuit against Napster in 2000. Though the lawsuit was eventually successful in shutting down Napster, the wide publicity generated by the anti-Napster lawsuit served to educate the public on MP3 files. Though the old Napster went out of business, the sharing of MP3 files mushroomed as awareness of what an MP3 file was.

In a way, we’ve come full circle. Fast forward to today, when thousands of musicians are selling their music directly to consumers via the Internet. Many independent musicians have discovered that making their music available on the Internet allows audiences spread across the world to hear and buy their music. A substantial number of musicians have made their music available on sites like Myspace.com, PodsafeMusicNetwork.com, GarageBand.com, Magnatune.com, etc. Many of them are discovering that they can sell their music directly to the public via the Internet without the middleman. Consumers get instant gratification by paying for reasonably priced legal music downloads.

Independent musicians that don’t fit into the neat, pre-defined genre music category slots can bypass the traditional music discovery and distribution methods and go straight to the public. Most people are honest and will pay for music and movies if it’s being sold in the form they want to consume it in. If it’s not available in the desired form, history has demonstrated over and over again that people will take an alternate approach in order to put entertainment into the format they desire.

It’s clear that the future of music, movies and other forms of entertainment is online. The music and movie industries will eventually come to terms with the fact that technology has changed yet again, and sales will eventually increase as broadband Internet continues to become more ubiquitous.