September 22, 2003

Think Debate on Music Property Rights Began With Napster? Hardly

ince Thomas A. Edison recorded the human voice in 1877, the music industry has grappled with the uncertainties wrought by new technologies.

"The form changes, but the issues - who owns the music, what rights pertain to artists, what rights pertain to the companies - these are issues that go way back into the 19th century,'' said Larry Starr, professor of music history at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author of "American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV'' (Oxford University Press, 2002).

The initial race to create a low-cost way to record and play back sound resulted in a number of competing companies. Many wound up merging forces around the turn of the 20th century, forming a stronghold that for the most part has been the locus of industry power for a hundred years. The RCA Music Group, part of the BMG unit of Bertelsmann; the EMI Group; and the Columbia Records unit of Sony are among the current music companies that have long, historic roots in the business.

"There has always been a tendency for several large companies to dominate the actual production and distribution, just because of how difficult it is,'' said Steven E. Schoenherr, professor of American history at the University of San Diego. "It takes a huge capital investment.''

Recorded music shifted the balance of power from sheet music publishers, which dominated the early music business, to record producers. But the reaction to technical innovation - whether radio in the 1920's, cassette recorders in the 1960's or MP3 players in the 1990's - has been consistent. "It's nothing new to say the recording companies are scared,'' Professor Schoenherr said. "They've always been scared.''

Now that the threat emanates from the computer and the Internet, though, the fear has taken on a new proportion for the recording companies, whose capital resources and established production and distribution systems may give them no particular advantages in the future.

"The Web eliminates two-thirds of the cost factors,'' said Richard Kurin, director of folk life and cultural heritage at the Smithsonian Institution. "You don't have to produce a hard product and you don't have to pay a middleman. The prospect is for greater dissemination, but also for greater participation. The Net has tremendous implications. The big industry question is, How do you handle those implications?''

Though no one can predict precisely how the music industry will evolve, many experts agree that a change in industry structure seems inevitable.

"Whatever the industry is going to be, it has to take a different form,'' said Christopher Waterman, dean of the school of arts and architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Professor Starr's co-author. "This is raising basic questions about property. Music has been turned into information, and once it is physically pulled away, not embedded in any material object, you're in a whole new world.''

A glimpse of the industry's future might be seen in the early success of iTunes Music Store, the online service that Apple Computer introduced in April, Professor Schoenherr said. "If they continue to innovate,'' he said, "they could make stars on their own.''