The Net Is Not the Club

Ulrich Gutmaier

MP3s evolution from pirate tech to the newest tool of capitalism gone cybernetic. Until recently, the Internet was the mythical space where everyone could store their utopias according to their desires. Anarchists on the left discovered a space free of control which they had thought was lost forever, whereas anarchists on the right ("libertarians") described the net in short as the conception of a 'free' global market, providing flat hierarchies for producers and brokers of information. Any consequences of loading this new space with your favourite teleology were not to be feared. What seemed to be nothing more than a question of faith or an expression of a fundamental ideological schism has now become a genuine conflict about control of channels. This conflict paradoxically might shape an economy that incorporates features which you thought were revolutionary a minute ago. Since it is not only possible to receive text and images on the Internet, but also sound of an acceptable quality, global markets have become accessible. The Big Players in the entertainment industries are confronted with a fundamental problem of the digital age because of new sound formats like MP3: every copy of a sound file is as original as the original.

With MP3, audio-pirates have the ultimate tool in their hands whilst musicians can very easily launch their own independent labels. "A band can become like a broadcaster" declared Public Enemy rapper Chuck D. and thus re-formulated the observation that on the internet, in principal, all senders and recipients are alike. The idea of a Temporary Autonomous Internet Zone is just as real as its antithesis of a market place of the future.

With MP3 you can upload and download sound files on the Internet with a quality almost as good as a CD, whereas a CD-Rom Burner, like the good old cassette recorder, is only effective on a local basis. Digital sounds are not only easily copied, but can also be sent from A to B via the Internet with just a single click.

Until recently, the music industry disregarded the home computer as an intimate interface between producer and consumer, and used it only as a place to sell over-priced CDs by the dozen. At the same time, however, pop music was booming over the Internet in the form of MP3 files. Where the introduction of the Compact Disk with its low production costs promised fat profits for the supplier who positioned himself between the musicians and the consumer, MP3 reduced the business of mediation by large enterprises to a level where it became virtually obsolete. If sampling was the most significant cultural technique of the 90s, digital formats are revolutionizing distribution at this point in time.

Public Enemy, themselves sampling geniuses, are now fighting the power online with MP3. When Polygram in 1998 constantly postponed the launch of the remix-album "Bring the Noise 2000", Chuck D. simply put their tracks on the net by using MP3. By going to www.public.enemy.com you could tune in for free to exactly what the industry kept away from fans. In legal terms, Public Enemy thus have become pirates of their own work.

The Polygram tracks have disappeared from the Internet in the meantime, therefore allowing Public Enemy to live in the knowledge that they are standing at the foremost in the anti-corporate frontlines. Their single "Swindler's Lust" which was offered as a free download contains a tirade against the music industry: "If you don't own the master, the master owns you." In the end, the legal characteristics of the formats prove to be more decisive than the technical, and the real exploiters of copyright are all too often not the artists themselves. For Chuck D. the representatives of the music industry are nothing more than pimps. But the new format however is the end of such exploitative behavior: "MP3 is a technology they can't pimp," he says. (Despite the fact that Public Enemy have resorted to technology as a medium for and object of political discussion, they still seem to be the same guys: This is demonstrated by their more than questionable anti-Semitic undertones they use to establish the criticism of capitalism in tracks like Swindler's Lust.)

The 'pimps', however, do not stay passive despite the threats and are fighting back. In 1999, the German music industry had shut down hundreds of Internet sites, on which stolen copies in MP3 format had been offered. But it seems this was not about actual damage, but more a PR strategy. In the current struggle for the power of definition on the new phenomenon, the industry is using the discursive killer application of "piracy". If this concept does not work in dominating public debate and attacking MP3, a studio and a cool website should be enough to reach millions of consumers in the future - if you have the means to get access to people's attention, of course.

With the creation of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), the powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) set up their own security organisation to protect the copyrights on "intellectual property" of the multinationals. Where text, picture, video and sound converge in binary code, this category of property which carries the ornament of the "intellectual" finds a warm place to grow. "Intellectual property" (and this is not only reported by stock exchange rates) is a form of ownership which in the digital nutrient solution is apparently undergoing an explosive expansion. If the idea of "intellectual property" in view of cultural products may still appear to be illuminating, categorical doubts should be raised at the latest when a human gene is patented as an invention. Or at least when the whole gene pool equivalent to a few hundred square miles of the Amazon forest can be privatized under the banner of "intellectual property".

When the subject is copyright, you could ask yourself about which or whose legal rights we are talking. Does culture by definition not belong to all? For Richard Stallman, a free software pioneer, the music industry has long ago lost its status as a socially necessary structure. Whilst it used to be needed in order to make as many people as possible enjoy music, it has meanwhile become an organisation to which musicians and consumers are equally unimportant. Musicians, who struggle in vain for copyright protection, do not normally receive a penny until their products really start raking in the cash. The huge amounts spent on marketing and the creation of publicity are usually labeled as an 'advance' to the artists. They are the ones that bear the risk whilst the record companies stand on the safe side of the actual copyright owner.

According to Stallman, the free distribution of music on the Internet gains enough publicity for bands so that they can become less dependent on record companies. Similar to the question of collective heritage which is raised by the privatization of the genetic code of the rainforests, the debate on ownership and copyright should not focus on legal terms, but on an idea of social relevance. But the monopolists of the cultural industry are only interested in society in so far as it is a conglomerate of target groups. SDMI attempts to create a new protected, 'safe' format, in order to re-monopolize ways of doing business. This lead to heavy criticism of the SDMI from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lobby organisation of Internet companies with a libertarian hippie tradition. They believe that safe software in conjunction with new hardware aims at closed circulation, so that free copies of sound files would no longer be available. At the end of development we would see the concept that *every* copy of a sound file (which might not even be copyright protected, because you recorded it yourself) would be violating copyright. Reacting against such plans for closed circulation, the EFF formed the opinion that audio is a primary way of expression: 'Speech' is audio and without free audio there would be no freedom of speech, declared EFF-spokesperson John Perry Barlow.

Barlow should know. The guy who believes that music belongs to all of us is an ex-associate of the Californian hippie band and commune Grateful Dead, who always encouraged their fans to distribute bootlegs of their music. It never harmed the Grateful Dead, but eventually led Deadheads to form the community of the WELL, which was technically based on a Bulletin Board System and allowed mutual exchange of all kinds of information, thus establishing a gift economy which was influential for the shaping of early net culture. An economy which now seems to inspire new ways of making business by creating virtual communities. These communities serve as data pools, test beds of consumer behavior and market places for 'customised' commodities, such as Cycosmos for example.

In the middle of 1999, the RIAA had its first setback. They lost a trial in which they had attempted to prohibit the use of an MP3 Walkman. The product, sold under the name Rio, enabled the direct downloading of MP3s in a portable device. The RIAA had claimed to no avail that Rio was a "digital audio recording device". This kind of fight against new technologies is as old as the cultural industries themselves. If it was the printing of scores or gramophones or tape recorders - the music industry always claimed that new technologies would threaten their existence. But in the end every technical progress was successfully incorporated into the structures of Big Business. If closed circulation can not be implemented on the level of technology, it surely will serve as a model for creating closed environments of consumer communities.

After the introduction of the cassette recorder, the music industry pointed the moral finger at the widespread use of such dangerous reproduction devices. In the early 1980s they printed the warning 'Home taping is killing music' on the inner sleeves of their records. Then, Punk replied. Independent labels were founded, own slogans printed: "Home taping is killing the music industry, keep up the good work!" At the beginning of 2000, you can replace 'home taping' by 'MP3'. The option could be real, again. But more likely is the outcome of MP3 as the industry's own new killer app, because it is forcing the industry to upgrade their marketing techniques.

As it was the case with independent production being neutralized by semi-autonomous sub-labels created and owned by the multinationals in the 1980s (the economic undercurrent of the shift from Punk to New Wave on the surface), the industry now tries to use independent production and the users' needs for community to create new forms of digital distribution. These new models deliberately operate under the superstar level and focus on unknown bands and producers by giving them platforms to publish their material on the net. As a byproduct the A&R people of big companies have easy access to consumers' wishes, new trends and promising producers.

The idea of such a platform for young unknown artists was successfully implemented by peoplesound.com last year, at least in terms of user rates. The company was founded by former record company executives who raised 75 million dollars of venture capital. Peoplesound.com even pays an advance of 160 Euros to artists who manage to be accepted by the company's experts. If concepts like peoplesound.com turn out to be successful in actually creating revenue, this might bring about some change in the structure of the music industry. Smart start-ups will exploit the inability of the Big Players to react and adapt quickly to the new network environment, but business as a proliferation of now more or less 'customised' entertainment products is far from being threatened.
In upgrading to smarter forms of marketing we might see the rise of a cybernetic capitalism, where the techniques of tracking users' desires and the distribution of customised products will merge to an almost organic process of endless feedback. Digital pop culture will then be defined within the relationship between you and your net terminal only, as an infinite loop of interlinked suggestions, desires and info-objects. Thus MP3 is neither a problem for the cultural industries nor a vehicle of artistic freedom as such. The possibilities of MP3 for distributing your own, independent expressions are only technical. Real impact emerges from a social practice which is relatively immune to the more and more personalized marketing techniques developed by the industries of style. A practice which therefore is able to disappear beyond the horizon of attention.
The debate on the cultural and social implications of new technologies and formats like MP3 should not forget that there is an outside of the network system as well, which might be much more important for the creation of autonomous spaces. Thus the people of Berlin's independent techno label Elektro (www.elektro.fm) have made a good point in declaring that the net is an interesting space, but will never achieve the same social significance as the club: "It's the game again. It's about accumulation and isolation. It's the opposite of a club. And we wished you rather did the opposite of the internet, but if you don't, enjoy it anyway."

(parts of this text were translated from german by sheindal cohen)