Capitalist Pundits and MP3s
By Micah Holmquist
May 19, 2000

This morning I awoke to a NPR’s Morning Edition and a commentary by Paul Raeburn of the Wall Street Journal on MP3s and the music industry. The gist of the commentator’s message was that the record industry and musical artists should give up on using legal action to stop the proliferation of MP3s, accept free music over the Internet as a given in the future, and then proceed to create a profitable business model that recognizes this reality.

There was nothing original about this outlook. Save for those connected to the music industry as well as the movie industry which fears facing a similar predicament in the near future with the expansion of bandwidth, few people are upset by MP3s being illegally distributed via sites like Napster. Most people have nothing to lose if music does become less expensive to consume.

What is interesting is that an individual in the WSJ milieu —that is a pundit for capitalism- is talking this way about the entertainment industry. Sure corporate capitalism might not always approve of the exact content of music and movies —the charge that entertainment products are hopelessly liberal is a staple of rags like the WSJ- but large profits and relatively frequent changes in the product generally keep the industry in the good graces of WSJ types. This compares favorably to the treatment of United States textile industry and rust belt manufacturing. Capitalist ideologues are usually willing to more or less tell the workers and, to a lesser extent, the owners in those fields to go to hell because they have not kept up with the times.

In a sense that is what is happening here -the argument is after all that the entertainment industry has not figured out a way to keep up with technological changes- but there is a keep difference. Unlike textiles where the goods are being produced in sweatshops where the workers will be debilitated if not killed by the conditions, the marketplace without the Internet is nearly as dependent on the entertainment industry as it was without it. Sure the media gives the occasional story about every person can be a movie maker via the web and digital cameras but it is beginning to be more and more accepted that web will primarily be, for most users, a vehicle for consumption and not expression or production. According to all but the rosiest accounts, that last area will remain concentrated in the hands of small group of executives.

The highly controversial and much hyped Napster is in fact part of this trend. Most users are up- and downloading the works of established artists. Sure the Juneau, Alaska punk band could put its tracks on Napster along with those that other users are trafficking of more established acts, like say Metallica whose tracks continue to flow freely, but who is going to hear them? Unlike even mp3.com, the users of Napster can’t look up music by category and must go by artist and song title searches. The lesson appears to be that the material may now be free but it will not be different. This should surprise nobody. Capitalism has no reason to favor the Juneau band over the Backstreet Boys and plenty of reasons to do the exact opposite. The entertainment industry does a pretty good job of controlling and limiting the influence of even the most radical artists.

So if the entertainment industry is likely to remain in place —albeit in an altered state-why are capital’s cheerleaders so willing to trash the industry as prehistoric? It certainly doesn’t stem from an aversion to enforcing copyrights. So-called intellectual property rights are an important feature of a marketplace regulated just enough so as to be relatively stable and are merit protection to the WSJ crowd. If you doubt this, just look at how they have defended the right of U.S. pharmaceutical companies to prevent their counterparts in underdeveloped companies from developing medicines based on copyrights that the U.S. companies own but are not currently using. These medications might save millions from death due to diseases like AIDS and malaria but that appears to be of little importance compared to the preservation of capitalist customs.

What it may be —although I don’t fell confident enough to label this idea as anything more than a hypothesis- is that today’s commentator correctly understands that the influence of the Internet can not be stopped and that if the entertainment industry fights too hard against the inevitable that it might end up further and irrevocably alienating a large music aficionados. They might turn away from the corporate product and sample leftist rappers, an avant Klezmer trio from Idaho, or the sounds emanating from Juneau garages. If that happened, it would only be a matter of time before a significant percentage of the movie going public abandoned Star Wars and Julia Roberts movies in order to see independent pictures where the characters might just be a bit more like them or involved in political action. As I said earlier, this would be a lot more difficult to control and might lead to people creating more and more of their own culture.

The likelihood of this process even starting is small regardless of what the music industry does in relation to MP3. And even if it did start, more likely that not it would fizzle out before long and/or not contain enough elements of oppositional —as opposed to alternative or counterculture- positioning to result in political or deep social change. But if the right chain of events were to occur then the whole game of capitalism, or at least capitalism in its current neo-liberal form, might come into question. The issue is not music bur rather music fans.

Some musicians are onto this. Last year at a December 20 show in Los Angeles, Zach de la Rocha of the openly radical group Rage Against the Machine told the crowd, "Everywhere we go, the police attack us, trying to get a boycott against Rage Against the Machine. Why do they do that? Do you think they’re afraid of revolutionary music?" According to a brief article by Lee Ballinger in the December 1999/January 2000 edition of Rock & Rap Confidential, the crowd wanted to answer yes "but they could tell from Zach’s body language that he might be going in a different direction." Indeed he was as the singer answered his own question with "NO! They do it because they’re afraid of you!"

The cops and those they serve will always be afraid of those they tread upon but the fear might just be a little less if the music industry decides to embrace the Internet. If my theory is correct, it appears that, even when the topic is music, capitalist pundits Raeburn perfectly understand the real bottom line.

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