I guess most people now are well aware of the Pirate Bay trial, and that they were found guilty by the Swedish court. I don’t think it is a good thing to steal anything, but I am puzzled by the case against file sharing and especially Pirate Bay. The music industry has a long history in fighting anything that they feel threaten their control over the distribution. They fought against radio, they fought against cassette tapes, they fought against video, and for some years now they have fought against the private use of legally bought CD’s and the Internet. It is something not so likable about it all, I say.

According to the music industry, I have committed a crime since my first cassette tape of music. My first crime against the music industry was in the form of a gift from my uncle, and it was a cassette tape copy of Procul Harum.I loved it and played it over and over – but little did I know that I was a hardcore criminal at that point. I’ve later purchased music from Procul Harum, so I guess I’ve done my repenting without even knowing it.

But, I’ve kept on copying music from friends, and have copied tapes to friends for a very long time. I’ve recently copied my own CD’s into digital formats so I can listen to it through different players, and I’ve been so naughty that I have taken pictures at concerts even though they said I wasn’t allowed….(that was a deliberate action, I’m afraid). But do I feel criminal? I can’t say I do. All I’ve done is in the name of enthusiasm over music. I’ve been a music evangelist for music I love, and I’ve been eager to listen in on new music. Both, the reason for copying music for my friends, and for copying music from my friends. I can’t say I felt even a sting of guilt by doing this. But since the Internet the music industry has told me over and over again how horrible a crime all this is, so I guess I am guilty in their view.

Reading about the industry taking housewife’s to court because of their file sharing of a handful songs, makes me wonder. They call it “setting an example”, and indeed they are. But what kind of example? An example on what you face if you share your music, or an example of an industry so obsessed with control and the money that follows, that they are willing to send a relatively innocent person into lifelong debts for sharing? Is this the industry crying for their own mother, or is it reflecting the artists will?

My guess is that they protect their industry and corporations – and not the creativity and well being among their artists. And I’ll explain why.

But Pirate Bay, you can argue, is not an innocent family housewife that happened to share her favorite album on the Internet. They call themselves pirates with a cassette scull as their symbol, god dammed!  Yes, I also see this point. They are probably not really that innocent. They know what they’re doing of course. Even though The Bay doesn’t actually have any illegal content, they are quite open about why they do what they do; provide the public with an one track minded and easy way to access torrent based files that by large contain content that you should otherwise be paying for. I do appreciate the right musician’s or film producers have to get paid for their work, and will be first in line to tell people that you should pay for a song if you like it and intend to store it or use it. But I also see that it is very difficult to control this marked like one did before the Internet. And I’m not certain that I want the pre-internet situation back.

Are musicians in general really the winners, if no one was allowed to share any of their songs without paying $19, 99 for their CD releases? I don’t think so. The big names, like i.e. U2, Madonna and Metallica can argue that almost every file share is an economic loss. But a small band from Oslo couldn’t argue like that at all. They are probably in the beneficial end of file sharing. By having their music spread virally on the internet, making them famous and even increasing their sales, they probably depend on the viral spread that goes with the file sharing activities. While the big names have a big contract with a global label, a small underground band, probably don’t. And if we look at the situation before the Internet, their chances of getting a contract with global distribution was next to zero. But with the Internet, and with the wildly spread of torrent files and Youtube videos, they now can “risk” that thousands around the globe will know of them in almost an instant.
Now, don’t get me wrong on this. I do think that it is a very good thing that musicians earn loads of money on what they do. That’s not my point. But it is to be said that not all file sharing is of a bad character.

So why try to stop file sharing? It is only one reason for it, and that is money. If you take out money from the formula, everything about file sharing is of the good. It makes it possible for small bands to get distribution, and it makes people more available for new music, because they don’t have to buy a song to listen to it and find out if they like it so much that they will pay for the album, or pay for the concert that are being put up for the band. I know this sounds a bit ideal, and I know that many artists disagree with me because in the end what pays for their ability to produce music is the value chain of music distribution. But, and there is a big but, what if the file sharing people really love your music? What if they just use file share to get music they otherwise wouldn’t pay for or they just want to check out. What if?

Could it be that file sharing is only bad for the establishment of traditional marked control in the music industry? What if the only one loosing in this exchange between artists and the public, are those who have a business model that depends on having control on what reaches the marked? Should we protect the business model, or should we protect the creativity and pluralism that follow? That is a rhetorical question, I know. Of course we want the creativity to benefit. But did it benefit in the pre-internet world? I would say no. The pre-internet system was dominated by a few big corporations that had nearly full control of the distribution in record shops, and on the radio. It was only the bands they chose that got attention. To ensure this, the big record companies spend unspeakable sums on marketing and branding, not to mention on copyrighting and other protective instruments. The model didn’t fail – we have got a huge number of brilliant artists within the model. But the model did not fit well with free creativity, and I’m convinced that a lot of brilliant artists have been “silenced” by the system, because they didn’t get the attention from the controlling corporations. There are too many examples to back this statement up, so I won’t go into them.

At a conference in Oslo this spring, one of the speakers said (I think it was Chris Anderson from Wired) that the Internet would not kill music and artists. But it would kill the system of old school music industry labels. I tend to agree.

The old system will fall, sooner or later. Whether the big companies like Warner Music and Sony will fall with it depends on what they do. There are alternative ways of selling music, and there are alternative ways of handling the value chain between artists and the public. There are even an alternative for copyright, namely the very successful Creative commons system.

So what’s the conclusion on this? Well, I honestly do not know. But something is in the making, and I do hope (and actually think) it is for the best for music. What I do know, is that I don’t want the old system back. I do think that there must be something better with the free distribution that today’s Internet represent, than the old system where label moguls ruled the arena. It might end up with less billionaires among artists, but millionaires will still be there.

What I do expect, is that the industry will adopt and change. That we will see new business models emerge, and that the fight against file sharing will be less important, and even something we can laugh about as we do over the industry’s attempt to stop video.