June 18, 2002
Would Mozart be pro-Napster?
If you thought you've read everything worthwhile regarding Napsterish arguments, read Joe Mahoney's blog today. He eloquently delineates the balance between propagating music and feeding musicians.
I surmise that the article in question is Tom Matrullo's here, written in 2000 (it's the top result in Googling for "Napster Mozart"). I wonder if Tom's thoughts on the subject have changed since 2000.
One thing Tom said:
We used to need the corpses: CDs, vinyl, tape, etc. We, the sorry-assed multitudes who couldn't get to the Met, La Scala, or Ozzfest to bask in the unmediated presence of the Voice, the Artist.This reminds me of the Robert H. Frank article Yes, the rich get richer, but there's more to the story, which begins with this paragraph:
At the turn of the twentieth century, when the state of Iowa alone had more than 1,200 opera houses, thousands of tenors earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences. Now that most music we listen to is pre-recorded, however, the world's best tenor can be everywhere at once. And since it costs no more to stamp out compact discs from Luciano Pavarotti's master recording than from a less renowned tenor's, most of us now listen to Pavarotti. Millions of us are each willing to pay a little extra to hear him rather than other singers who are only marginally less able or well known. And this helps explain why Pavarotti earns millions of dollars a year, even as other tenors nearly as talented struggle to get by.So, before music was reproducible "product", we had a more even distribution of wealth. Also, variety in music was more geographically based than now (lamented in a recent NPR piece about radio homogeneity due to ClearChannel et al). Easily accessible reproduction created stars and rendered life harder for the rest, for two reasons: fame became magnified, and income became concentrated through record sales (not to mention higher ticket prices).
So what's happening with file sharing? What was commerce becomes just sharing.
[blog in progress...]