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ISBN: 978-0-85712-096-0

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Foreword

Although it is a relatively recent invention, the Internet has woven itself into the fabric of our collective lives. Words like ‘email’ and ‘download’ have become a part of our everyday vocabulary and ‘attachments’ added to emails have given us the ability to send information of all types around the world in seconds.

Nowhere has this technological revolution been more exciting – and more controversial – than in the music industry. Downloading digital music has already become more popular than purchasing singles on CD, and it’s not a stretch to say that it’s the format of choice for a new generation of music listeners.

MP3 players in general, and the iPod in particular, with its massive storage capacity and ease of use, have tranformed the way many people listen to and purchase music. Never before have you been able to carry around most, if not all, of your music collection in your pocket. Combined with iTunes, the iPod represents an entirely new way of maintaining and adding to your music collections.

Yet, like most things, the digital music revolution also has a dark side: illegal downloading, which deprives artists, songwriters, and producers of their income, has been the scourge of major record labels that were slow to realise its significance. The record companies are now catching up, with an increasing number of ‘official’ download sites popping up, assuring downloaders of high-quality versions of their favourite songs – and royalties at last being distributed to the rightful copyright owners.

Having been a successful record producer for over 25 years, the ability to download and send audio files over the Internet has revolutionised the way I do my work. I can, for instance, start a backing track in London, have guitar parts added by a colleague in California and then send the finished mix to anyone in the world with access to a computer.

With all this technology at our fingertips, the learning curve can be quite steep for those not already familiar with the ways of computing. Facing what they see as a truly daunting task, many quit before they even get started.

The Art of Downloading leaves out all the techno-speak and cuts to the chase, helping you get up and running and downloading as fast as possible. It answers many of the most commonly asked questions (and in my career I’ve been asked many) and shows you the neat tips and tricks that you can pick up along the way. It’s a book I wish I’d had years ago; you’ll be enjoying the digital music experience in no time.

Introduction:
The Future Is Here

‘It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.’

Charles Darwin

It could be said that music, more than any other traditional form of art, is something that is meant to be shared. Part of what makes a live concert such an electrifying and unforgettable experience is the element of communality, a unifying event that you can discuss afterwards with friends and peers as you lord over ticket stubs, t-shirts, and memories for years to come. Music is both an intensely personal, yet ultimately universal experience, and nothing speaks so clearly to teenagers as do their favourite artists. It’s hard to imagine a painter or novelist entertaining thousands of screaming fans, while for most popular musicians, such treatment is de rigeur.

And it is teenagers who are the most computer literate, adept at adopting new technologies with relative ease. (It is said that most teenagers spend upwards of seven hours a week online, and much of that is devoted to finding and downloading music.) Perhaps this is why new technologies like peer-to-peer file-sharing programs have been adopted so effortlessly by the music-consuming public, of which teenagers comprise a significant percentage, and whose tastes in music, albeit loyal to a fault, are fluid and impressionable all the while. But over the past quarter decade, since the first home personal computer was introduced to the market, sweeping changes in technology have revolutionised the musical landscape as we know it. The advent of the Internet, the ‘open sourcing’ of software and technologies like that used by Napster, the cultural imperative to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ have all contributed to how music is produced, purchased, consumed and experienced. What would Bauhaus and the Cure be without a serious Goth fanbase, or the Sex Pistols and the Ramones without the punks? From performer to producer, from band to DJ, music has always been a communal experience – something to be shared with family, with peers, with anyone who has a love of music.

But the definition of ‘share’ has changed dramatically over the years. From the early dubbing of tape cassettes to current legal file-sharing services such as Apple iTunes and the new incarnation of Napster – as well as illegal ones like Kazaa and Morpheus – vast changes, prompted by technological developments, have brought what was once a behemoth of an industry nearly to its knees. Somewhat ironically, over the past six years, almost at the same time as music labels were undergoing massive mergers to form five powerful corporations, individuals were developing the technology to subvert a system the labels were doing everything in their power to maintain. In 1999, one such individual, the 18-year-old college dropout Shawn Fanning, AKA ‘Napster’ (a nickname earned by a shock of ‘nappy’ hair that he tamed with the aid of a baseball cap), created a code that allowed users to share compressed music files, AKA MP3s, via a centralised file server, with anyone else in the world equipped with no more than a computer, modem and a copy of his program. Little did he know it would be a shot heard (literally) around the world.

History has taught us that the prohibition of any mutually beneficial exchange is doomed to fail. Take a woman named Carrie Nation, and one of the least successful campaigns in history – the Prohibition. Her life (as she perceived it) marred by alcoholics, she took a hatchet to her local saloons in Kansas where alcohol was, at least on the books, illegal, attacking individual establishments in order to spread her message and contempt for the widespread flouting of the law.

Fast-forward a century, and replace Carrie Nation with the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA), and the Prohibition with the current downloading ‘crisis’, and you might gain some insight into the current situation. Much as Carrie went for individual saloons, the RIAA is going after individual file swappers in an attempt to combat illegal file-sharing on a case-by-case basis. But such methods have proved to be extremely unpopular, the media portraying the RIAA as a ham-fisted Goliath who is stomping out Davids with tiny bedroom ‘operations’ in order to maximise their profits. One New York Daily News cover story detailed the plight of a 12-year-old Catholic school student named Brianna LaHara, who faced a potential multi-million dollar lawsuit for downloading sitcom soundtracks and nursery jingles like ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’. It was eventually settled for far less ($2,000 and her mother’s promise that LaHara would never illegally share files again), but it was, for the most part, a serious public-relations blunder for the RIAA. However, the Association remains convinced that legal action is an effective deterrent against download pirates – particularly hard-core’ copyright abusers. In one case, a Michigan college student was caught offering 650,000 files – the equivalent of 43,000 albums – and in early 2005 RIAA lawyers unleashed more than 1200 lawsuits, including 150 served on pirates working an academic peer-to-peer network called Internet2. Some 38 campuses were involved and the president of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, warned there would be no immediate let-up.

‘As long as students continue to corrupt this specialised academic network for the flagrant theft of music we will continue to make clear that there are consequences for these unlawful actions,’ he said. ‘These lawsuits have had a significant educational impact on the public and have helped to arrest the staggering growth of digital music theft. We will continue to aggressively pursue them.’

By the start of 2005, US record companies had issued more than 5,700 digital piracy writs on individuals, securing thousands of out-of-court settlements. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which believes 15% of file-sharers are responsible for 75% of illegal swapping, had targeted 28 ‘major uploaders’ while across Europe a further 459 pirates faced prosecution from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, pushing its ‘scalp-count’ above 7,000. The IFPI says settlements in Germany and Austria average ‘several thousand euros’ (1,000 euros are worth around £700).

The big test of this strategy will lie in the performance of file-swapping websites such as one-time market leader Kazaa. There’s no doubt that the number of its users has fallen – down from 35 million in 2003 to fewer than 20 million now – and in October 2004 Kazaa was overtaken for the first time by its main US rival, eDonkey. According to the Californian firm BayTSP, which monitors file-swapping networks on behalf of entertainment companies, eDonkey averaged 2.54 million users a day in September 2004 while Kazaa lagged behind on 2.48 million.

Yet trigger-happy lawyers are not the sole, or even main, reason for Kazaa’s decline. For one thing there’s so much more competition out there – both legal and illegal. For another, Kazaa’s core technology is reaching pensionable age. It was founded on the exchange of MP3-formatted files before the brave new world of broadband, DVD burners and super-efficient file compression. Now the focus is switching to more video-friendly software such as BitTorrent, already thought to be well ahead of Kazaa in terms of bulk downloads.

So how have the record labels and artists they represent responded to the music download phenomenon? After several years in agonised denial they faced the same change-or-die choice which confronts every industry eventually. For the labels this really was meltdown time. Fighting off new competition was one thing. Fighting competitors who (a) delivered a similar product for free and (b) stole their existing product with aplomb was altogether more sinister. Why would music fans waste time and money in record shops?

Despite the RIAA’s persistent and dire warnings it became clear that copyright lawsuits alone could never hold back the flood. The last seven years have shown that downloading music is too easy to learn, too convenient to dismiss, too ubiquitous to ignore. In a climate where millions of people now shop for everything from prescription medicines to houses online, the idea that the courts can completely halt all illegal file-sharing is akin to pretending they can eliminate tax fraud. History tells us otherwise.

That’s why, in a triumph of pragmatism over corporate egotism, the record companies have adopted a common sense approach to file-swappers. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – only be better. This strategy, coupled with a groundbreaking US Supreme Court decision in June 2005 (see War On The Web: The Law of Downloading), may finally have turned the tide in favour of the industry. Apple can rightly claim to have been in the vanguard of the action.

In 2003, amid some scepticism, Apple presented American users with their first legal option for a download fix – the iTunes music library, available for download for free or packaged with OS X on a Mac. By reaching an agreement with the Big Five labels, and hundreds of indies (independents), Apple secured the rights to sell music online – individual tracks for 99 cents and entire albums for $9.99, with the labels, artists and Apple all receiving a cut of the profits.

In June 2004 a version of iTunes was launched in the UK, closely followed by a European roll-out. The response was staggering. Legal sales of UK downloads were £10.4 million for the year – up from virtually zilch in 2003 to 4.5 million tracks – and in the week following its European launch the site sold 750,000 songs. Conservative estimates suggest the UK market alone will grow to £468 million by 2009 – roughly a quarter of the country’s current CD and record sales.

World-wide, the IFPI says legal music download sites quadrupled to over 230 in 2004 while paid-for downloads increased tenfold to over 200 million. Apple has taken by far the biggest cut of this market, logging 300 million downloads between iTunes’ inception on April 29th 2003 and May 2005 – sales worth £1.3 billion. This success is reflected in world-wide sales of the iPod which quadrupled in the year to April 2005. Around 8 million were sold in 2004 and 4.5 million between December 2005 and April 2005. If this trend continues Apple chief executive Steve Jobs will retain the god-like status he enjoys among shareholders. But, as he knows, you move from triumph to tragedy very quickly in Computerland.

Which seems an appropriate moment to briefly recount the troubled history of Apple and its much-feted Macintosh computer. There’s something about a fanatical Mac-user which rather frightens the horses, perhaps because he or she is more cult-follower than customer. That said, the Mac operating system remains the only serious challenger to Windows and is widely regarded as superior. But for one strategic error Apple, not Microsoft, would now be King of the PCs.

Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak began work on a prototype PC in 1975. They built the first one in Jobs’ garage the following year and promptly founded Apple Computers with a third man, Ron Wayne. Four years later they floated the company on Wall Street and the stock increased by 1700% in its first year. By the time the Macintosh was unveiled on January 24th, 1984 the business looked unstoppable. Its technology was so advanced that the Pentagon banned all exports to Russia.

Then Apple went pear-shaped. The following year Wozniak left and a bitter feud began between Jobs and his Chief Executive Officer John Sculley. This ended with Jobs quitting and the long road to meltdown in 1997 when Apple’s sales collapsed amid debts of $1 billion. The reasons for this are endlessly complicated (don’t ever ask a Mac-lover his view unless you have a sleeping bag with you) but most people accept that whereas Microsoft sold Windows licences cheaply and widely, Apple jealously guarded its own crown jewels. No surprise then that hardware giants like IBM chose Windows as their operating system.

Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and immediately sought a closer relationship with Microsoft. This brought accusations of a sell-out from the Mac faithful but the accounts told a different story. Within two years Apple had annual profits of $601 million and was selling – in Jobs words – ‘one Mac every six seconds’.

The iPod and iTunes products may have continued this extraordinary turnaround but the competition is now hotting up fast. There is a huge range of online music stores – some with their own libraries; others simply providing access and payment software. Among the biggest suppliers are MusicMatch (owned by Yahoo), Rhapsody, Sony Connect, MSN Music, MyCokeMusic, Virgin Digital and (in the US) Wal-Mart. They all offer slightly different products and price packages – just like your friendly neighbourhood High Street store – and you need to know precisely what you’re buying.

For instance, if you’re shopping in iTunes you can download songs in Apple’s AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) format as well as MP3. Go to Wal-Mart and you’ll find WMA (Windows Media Audio). Like iTunes, Sony has a custom media player, called Connect, while Rhapsody uses RealPlayer. But more of all this nuts ‘n’ bolts stuff later. For the time being, bear in mind the views of Virgin Digital president Zack Zalon, as reported in Billboard magazine. Digital music is going to eventually supplant hard goods,’ he said, ‘and any retailer who is ignoring that fact is doing so at their own peril.’

He may be right. But it’s still a bit too early to fling your CDs frisbee-like into the nearest dustbin. In 2004, 237 million CD albums (excluding compilations) were sold in the UK, a year-on-year increase of 3 per cent, while in the US growth was almost as impressive rising 2.3 per cent to 652 million.

Recent studies have shown that while popular file-swapping services like Kazaa have decreased quite radically in popularity since the RIAA initiated the lawsuits (according to a recent PC World article, Kazaa currently has 20 million users, down from 35 million less than a year ago) many other smaller peer-to-peer services are flourishing under the radar. And research indicates that the number of people using peer-to-peer services has remained more or less stable over the past nine months – a pretty safe bet that downloading music from the web isn’t going out of fashion any time soon.

So, what are the record labels and artists whom they represent to do? The writing was on the wall, and it said if they weren’t ready to make serious changes in the way they managed their business, they were going to go under. Why would fans buy music from stores if it were available at the touch of a button, and for free? The past five years have shown that the downloading of music is not simply a fad – it’s too easy to learn, too convenient to dismiss, too ubiquitous to ignore. In a climate where millions of people now shop for everything from prescription medicines to used cars online, it seems highly unlikely that random lawsuits will stop illegal file-sharing any more than the threat of an IRS crackdown will one day eliminate tax fraud.

Last year in the US, amid some scepticism, Apple introduced the first legal option for those jonesing for a legal download fix – the iTunes music library, available for download for free or packaged with OS X on a Mac. By reaching an agreement with the Big Five and hundreds of indie labels, Apple secured the rights to sell the music online – individuals tracks for 99 cents, and entire albums for $9.99, with the labels, artists and Apple, all receiving a cut of the profits. In June 2004, a version of iTunes for the UK, Germany and France was launched, with plans for a Europe-wide version by the end of the year. Others (like MusicMatch, Rhapsody, Sony Connect, even Walmart) have followed in its wake, though none of these have a music library or a custom media player like iTunes. Virgin Entertainment Group will also be joining the fray with its Virgin Digital entertainment platform, and will launch its independent download store later this year. In addition to downloads, Virgin’s music store will offer music management software and subscription services, and will be backed by the online Radio Free Virgin Internet radio stations which will be linked to the Virgin Digital service. But Apple, which bundles hardware, software and a portable player – the iPod – into a tidy, easy-to-manage package, is by far the most successful of these ventures, reaching 70 million downloads within its first year of inception and over 85 million to date. ‘Digital music is going to eventually supplant hard goods, and any retailer who is ignoring that fact is doing so at their own peril,’ Virgin Digital president Zack Zalon was quoted in a recent issue of Billboard. It seems the labels have finally caught on.

One thing that has slowed down the universal adoption of iTunes and other downloading services has been a lack of cooperation by some marquee artists. Artists like Madonna and Led Zeppelin remain in digital purgatory, while other big-name acts have exclusive deals with competing services, where fans can go to buy music, album art, tickets and more. The Beatles catalogue, however, which has been unavailable as a legal download until now, may soon be available – sources say that representatives for the group have been in talks with several online music providers. Insiders speculate that when the world’s most popular rock group’s entire catalogue is available for download could well prove to be the watershed moment in digital music history.

Another sign that the tide is turning are artists that are gearing their album-release campaigns with digital downloads in mind. The Beastie Boys, for example, released their entire catalogue online in April 2004 a day before premiering their single, ‘Ch-Check It Out’, exclusively on iTunes. Even more startling is the fact that the stony-faced RIAA now includes digital online sales (from legitimate sources) when determining a song’s eligibility for gold and platinum status.

Even more startling is the fact that the stony-faced RIAA will, come August, include digital online sales (from legitimate sources) when determining a song’s eligibility for gold and platinum status. Sales of 100,000 singles will earn a gold award, with double that amount required for a platinum award. CDs must achieve higher figures to receive RIAA awards, with gold at shipments of 500,000 copies and platinum at 1 million units. In the UK, the first ever download singles chart will be debuted in September 2004.

And the future looks even brighter for those who like their music wherever they are, whenever they want it: mobile phone retailer T-Mobile recently launched a service that allows customers to download music to their mobile phones. Motorola are now producing an iTunes integrated phone. In the UK, where there are perhaps 50 million GSM mobiles, this could have major impact in terms of market share – Forrester Research estimates a $100 billion global market by 2008.

As more people discover how easy it is to download music, these numbers are sure to increase dramatically. It would be optimistic to say that all of these downloads will be legal, but with programs like iTunes making it possible to preview a clip of the music before downloading it, browsing, purchasing, and enjoying music is becoming easier than ever before. And with the record labels and the RIAA tailoring their business to meet the needs of a tech-savvy generation, digital downloads would seem to be the wave of the future. In fact, it’s almost impossible to imagine a future without them.

A Conversation with
Steve Levine

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is an MP3?

It was invented by a group of German scientists in 1987 as a way of shrinking video files down to a manageable size to run on computers. They did it by stripping away as much data as possible from the sound and the visual files – all the stuff that listeners and viewers theoretically don’t notice. After the code was approved by the International Standards Organisation, it became known as ISO-MPEG Audio Layer-3, or MP3 for short. Then it hung around, waiting for a handful of maverick music fans and computer geeks to see its real potential.

How did it become the main way that people swap music files on the Internet?

Music fans began using it to encode and swap bootlegs of things like Grateful Dead concerts. A few sites sprang up using MP3s to showcase unsigned new music acts and even to sell downloads by established names. But then a 17-year-old lad from Massachusetts called Shawn Fanning wrote a very clever piece of code that enabled people to connect to the web and share all the music stored on their computers with anyone else in the world who wanted to copy it. He sent it to a small group of computer hacker friends who improved and refined it, then in June 1999 made it available through a site called napster.com. Napster became big so quickly that the music industry didn’t even realise what was happening until it was too late.

The industry eventually took legal action – as did the hard rock band Metallica, who were furious that people could take their music without paying for it. Napster has been forced to change, and it now offers legal music downloads for PC users. But by then it was too late – the idea was out there, the computer program that enabled it was refined and rewritten by countless others, and now there are thousands of sites where music fans can illegally share their music collections with other computers around the world.

Why the MP3?

Because it was a readily available format that seemed to translate very easily and it squashed the data rate down to almost nothing. On a CD an album comes to 650MB for an hour’s worth of music. So even with broadband, if you want to transfer a full-quality album in one go, you’ll have plenty of time to go and put the coffee on! An MP3 reduces the file size down quite dramatically with some loss of the original quality. How much quality you lose depends on the song. Certain songs squash down well and the MP3 sounds pretty good. Other songs really do sound terrible. But what’s brilliant is, you can squash it down small enough that you can effectively attach an MP3 file to an email. And suddenly storing your entire music collection on your computer becomes practical.

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