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By
Jack Rooney
From
p2pnet.net
On p2p ...
... I think file trading and downloading is great. I honestly hope my music ends up on every P2P file trading network in the world. That's why I post my music files freely on an internet site for anyone who cares to take the time to download and listen without locks or passwords or give-me-your-email-address terms and conditions. Allowing unrestricted downloading of my music to the public combined with word of mouth advertising I receive is the best form of advertising around.
I would like to see a downloaded mp3 file of my music on the desktop computer hard drive of everyone on the internet. It would be fine with me. I do not agree with those who say file sharing is destroying the recording industry. It may be destroying the major industry powers, but it isn't hurting me a bit. I am just as much a part of the "recording industry" as any artist in the world who has a song recorded. It's good for my business.
What is most important is the work you create as an artist and what the public thinks of it. Not what the Major Labels think of it. Not what the RIAA thinks of it. Not what the A&R people with the major recording studios think of it. Not what the Record Chain stores think of it. But what the public thinks. The public, after all, is the final judge, the ultimate end purchaser, the consumer, the buyer of your art, or not. Brick and mortar music stores will not stock CDs until the public demands it. Once you create demand with internet plays and radio plays, the music stores will come to you because their customers will request it.
So the RIAA has it all wrong. Their cartel members, the "big five", are just concerned about their own bank accounts and the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of guys like me who now have access to the ear of the people and are who are giving the majors a good healthy run for their money.
And on music site payola scams ...
... as of today, I am still a performing artist listed to on MP3.com. But I don't know for how much longer my music will remain accessible to the public at the MP3.com music site. I am not giving them any money to play my music. I never give any of the music sites money to play my music. I give them my music to play for their site visitors, but I will not let the site operators pick my pocket. I have strong professional, ethical, and moral objections to "payola" and to the activities of payola music site operators.
MP3.com, bought up by Vivendi Universal Corporation in 1999, recently announced that, after January 30, 2003, it would allow only 3 songs on the web site pages of any non-payola artist and is "unlisting" all but three songs from the non-payola artist's web pages - wouldn't want the public to see the truth about just how prolific and creative some of these independent, unsigned artists really are now.
Non-payola artists who visited their web pages on MP3.com this week found all but three of their songs unlisted, out of sight, out of mind. Of course, this new rule will exclude Vivendi's own catalogue of signed artists and artists who payola to Vivendi under what they call the "Premium Artists Program," where the artist pays Vivendi a fee to host and play their songs on the MP3.com web site in a more prominent position, and premium payola allows the artist up to 100 songs to appear in front of the public eye and ear.
Artists who become payola artists, or who are already signed under contract with Vivendi Universal or its affiliates or subsidiary or associate record labels, can exhibit any number of songs on their MP3.com web pages, but otherwise not. Before 1/30/03 both payola and non-payola artists could exhibit any number of songs on their web pages, and anyone visiting the artist's web page could, if they wished, stream the entire catalogue of any artist's songs.
The recent ultimatum issued by Vivendi to non-payola artists to 'either payola or suffer censure by deletion from public view' has troubling implications. But let's remember that Vivendi is experiencing some pretty shaky financial times and is currently under investigation by French, European Common Market and US securities regulators. It could easily be the first European Enron. So it is not at all surprising to me that it might resort to desperate means to raise fast cash, including blackmail, attempted blackmail, extortion, and attempted extortion, and blatant censorship of it's competitors.
If all the independent artists who now have the capacity to record their own music were allowed to exhibit their wares in an open marketplace, in open competition with all other artists in the world, consumers would be able to make real comparisons between signed and unsigned artists. If all the work of these independent artists were publicly visible and available, the public would have a wider range of choices, and Vivendi (and its associate labels) can not afford that. The independent artists were beginning to compete too much with artists signed under contract with Universal and all the other established members of the international record label cartel. So, in an effort to maintain market position, MP3.com has resorted to censorship. "Unlisting" an artists work from public view is censorship by definition, regardless of what rational they give for their actions..
Vivendi has claimed that the change was necessary to prevent artists from "gaming" the system. But this is only a partial truth, partial in the sense that it is true that, by using the faster more powerful computer systems available now connected with broadband, a "gaming" artist could open a multitude of media players simultaneously on a single desktop and create multiple streams of their own stations or pages and pump up their own play stats or hits, for which they then expected Vivendi to pay for under it's pay for play program. But since only payola artists are eligible for pay for play,"unlisting" non-payola artists has no effect on the alleged gaming problem Vivendi claims it is experiencing.
Also, in view of the fact that MP3.com has been using cookie technology to identify and track visitor/ listener activity and knows perfectly well who is playing what based on the unique computer identifier information it receives from the cookies it plants on visitor's computers when the visitor logs on (songs will not stream at all unless cookies are accepted by the receiving computer, and the cookies have the ability to uniquely identify the listener's computer), so the "gaming" issue is a red herring concocted by Vivendi spinmasters to pseudo- legitimize its act of censorship against independent non-payola artists; in what appears to be a bad faith attempt to lessen the likelihood that the crash dummies who would never think about it will catch on to the "bait and switch" scam Vivendi is really trying to pull over on the non-payola artists who have contributed content to its site. In simple terms, Vivendi does not appear to be telling us the whole truth about it's motives.
The classic "bait and switch" scam Vivendi is using on it's content providers is a form of "confidence scam" (see Blacks Law Dictionary) used most frequently by drug dealers to fleece money from addicted drug users. It is a deliberate con, sometimes called a "con game" designed to get money from an unsuspecting "target." In this case, the "targets" are all the artists who have contributed music freely to Vivendi's database, and who have ultimately made it what it is today, believing it would result in increased sales and promotional value to the artist. It sounded like a pretty good deal to begin with. Tens of thousand of artists have contributed their music to the MP3.com data base freely and in good faith.
Many artists have spent a considerable amount of time, effort, labor, and energy setting up their web pages on MP3.com, and having most of that personal equity value and effort stripped away on a Vivendi whim under dubious motives is damaging to the artists who originally took part in the building of the MP3.com music portal.
The whole scam Vivendi is pulling now on it's own content suppliers is a text- book example of the classic bait 'n switch con. I am astounded anyone has fallen for it. But I believe that in general people are trusting and have no idea just how insidious con games really are or how they work.
The classic bait 'n switch con game begins by offering the target something for free, a little nose candy to get them started, the bait, in this case, free music hosting, and then once the target becomes dependent on the good high and is liking it a lot, the switch occurs, the con changes the rules of the game by playing on the target's dependency, starts jacking up the price, and extorts money from the target under threat of discontinuance. The con scam involves a very sophisticated form of both blackmail and extortion - pay up or suffer undesirable consequences. I find it a bit ironic that Vivendi should complain of "gaming" when it is itself such a clear master of the "gaming" conform.
MP3.con has turned into the biggest scam payola music site in the Internet, at the top of the food chain of a growing multitude of other payola music sites on the Internet, into something very different from what the original artist content providers were led to believe it would be, an outlet for the music of independent artists. It has changed into a payola site designed to pick the pocket of unsuspecting musicians and a cesspool of major record label and payola junk. The public allure of MP3.com, and its viability as a business model for streaming music, was originally founded on the fact that the public was fed up with the junk it was spoon-fed by the corporate giants from terrestrial radio. MP3.com visitors were visiting precisely because they were tired and unhappy with terrestrial radio mainstream mediocrity and wanted something different, more variety, more content, and the ability to choose between a diverse range of musical offerings. Payola has made it into a farce, much like terrestrial radio is a farce. Of course, the public typically can not see the farce because they are subjected by the media giants to the Platonic "parable of the cave," where they are chained to the wall of a media cave throughout their whole life, able to see only the shadows on the wall of things passing by outside in the real world, and because their perception is restricted, they believe that reality is the shadows they see on the wall, not knowing, because they are unable to know, that a whole other world exists beyond the entrance to the cave.
There is a very thin line between honest advertising and payola. I believe artists have every right to advertise, but I also believe payola represents everything that is wrong with the music industry when it is used as a means to create false perceptions in the mind of the general public that payola artists somehow equate with quality. And that is exactly what payola does. It involves a deception, an attempt to dupe the public into believing and accepting something that is not necessarily true. It uses money to shove mediocrity in the public's face by moving the payola artists to the top of the play charts and into the public eye based on how much money is given the site operator, and that is clearly wrong, bad for the performing arts in general, and works against the best public interest in the performing arts marketplace.
Art should be judged by the public in the open light of truth unrestrained by chains that bind them to false perceptions. The value of art should be determined by the public from the intrinsic value of the work itself, by it's inherent artistic qualities of excellence or the lack of it, and not by payola scams that distort public perception by strongly implying and suggesting that this and that payola artist is superior quality because they have given the site operator payola to say so. In most cases, where payola is involved, the only real reason the artist is prominently displayed up-front in relation to all other artists who participate at the music site is because such artists have paid for the up front position, and this "artificially-created status position" is by no means clear or self-evident or conspicuously revealed to the public.
Payola interferes with public perception of the arts by creating an artificial categorical imperative that the public comes to rely upon that is unreal, and, thus, all payola involves a deception and is therefore a scam, a con committed against the public.
In its mildest mild form, payola creates a distortion of truth; in its extreme forms, it is false, misleading, and deceptive advertising designed to promote commercial interests above the public's interest and right to reasonably expect truth in advertising regarding commercial product offered for sale in the commercial marketplace. That is why Congress of the United States has outlawed payola for radio broadcasts of music, and I see no reason why Internet music sites like MP3.con should be any different.
Unfortunately for Vivendi Universal's MP3.com (and all the other streaming media payola sites), the Internet business model upon which it is built and the computer and Internet technology used to create it is not proprietary and not copy proof. Anyone can do what MP3.com has done if they have the wherewithal and patience to develop it, which really requires little more than a daisy chain of large capacity hard drives connected to a data base manager and an Internet server. Just set up the hardware, install the software, plug into a broadband connection, invite artist to upload their MP3 music files to the data base, and presto, an MP3.com clone will appear overnight. It took MP3.com about five years to get to the place it presently enjoys. But the computer technology used to build it is available in the public domain, nothing really proprietary going on here, mostly open media format, and anyone can use it and can duplicate the basic MP3.com business model who has the know-how, and many know how.
MP3.com clones are already arising all over the place on the Internet, and all the older, established media portals, especially those built on the payola model and running the confidence scams, are headed for some ruff times from competing sites who are now setting up, or who already exist, that do not operate by payola deception. But older portals like MP3.com are still at the top of the search engines, and as long as they can stay there, they will milk it for all it's worth. But because the basic business model is not copy proof in terms of the technology it incorporates to make it go, its long-term industry dominance is questionable.
Take Lycos, for example. They have an artist program that lets the artist build a web page and gives them some storage space for their music files for free. They appear to be legit. It cost nothing for the artist. They do not seem to care whether you are signed or unsigned. I think right now they are trying to build up their artist data base so they can compete with MP3.con. Lycos may be positioning itself to give MP3.com a good healthy run for it's money. Lycos has been around a long time and understands how the Internet works and already has an established visitor base, so streaming media is a natural extension of what it is already doing. I hope it works. We need more competition among these music sites. Perhaps market competition will help curb the growth of payola scam sites and cause the site operators to re-think their business strategy.
If web operators like Amazon.com were to ever decide to get into the streaming media business, with their established visitor base, knowledge of net technology, and experience in eCommerce, Vivendi could kiss it's unrighteous buttocks goodbye. But regardless, music media portals are on the rise, and the more music sites available to the public, the better it will be for artists who wish to compete for market share. Since the Internet holds the potential for an unlimited number of competing music sites, sites that try to restrict competition or scam the artists are doomed. Sites that play along more ethical, more equitable business lines with the artists will rise up to take the place of the scam payola sites.
So let these sites stream your music all they want under whatever terms and conditions are acceptable to you as an artist, but never let them pick your pocket.
Jon Newton
scottjw
I 
, but now I 
