Directory:Akahele/The more things change...

It never fails to amaze me the amount of loyalty some people will give to whatever website happens to be the latest big thing. If one looks at the underlying function of most of these sites, one wonders why things which are intended to serve as tools for conveying information, images, or other such content are seen as objectives in and of themselves. Yet, over and over again, the crowd flocks to whatever happens to be the flavor of the month, insisting that this is going to be the thing to completely change the world.

If one were cynical, one would be tempted to recall dear Mr. Plato and his <a href="http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html">allegory of the Cave</a>. However, perhaps Rousseau's plus ça change, plus que ça reste pareil or Léo Ferré's Quand c'est fini, ça recommence would suffice. Human nature tends to repeat itself and what is happening now has probably happened before. Web 2.0 is no exception.

Back to the Dark Ages of Web 1.0

Of course, the Web 1.0 was another story, since things were much simpler back then. Musicians were almost uniformly excited about how this internet thing was going to change our lives. And it did: in the digital dark ages (way back in 1995), a man named Robin Whittle wrote an article entitled <a href="http://www.firstpr.com.au/musicmar/mmed.html">Music Marketing in the Age of Electronic Delivery</a> which basically predicted pretty much everything that we take for granted today. To quote his abstract :

By the turn of the century many music consumers are expected to have fast network access, home computers and CD-R disc writers. This will enable them to purchase music via electronic delivery, rather than on physical media such as compact disks. Existing distribution channels and radio's stylistically restrictive music discovery process will be bypassed as artists and listeners engage in two way communication, without geographic restrictions. Radical changes to industry structure are expected. As amateur musicians share music electronically, folk music - withering in the age of mass media - may flourish in the 21st century, in a profusion of contemporary styles.

For those of us working in the backwaters of the music business (classical music, jazz, world music, etc.), these new possibilities seemed like the answer to many problems facing us: how to deliver our product to our relatively small audience without spending the profits on producing stock. These tools have changed the way we do business, but they have also led to a number of developments which no one could have expected.

The darling of Web 1.0: MP3.com

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Michael Robertson, former MP3.com CEO

For example, take one of the biggest success stories of the dot-com era: MP3.com. Started in 1997 by the CEO of Z Company (filez.com, websitez.com, and sharepaper.com) <a href="http://michaelrobertson.com/">Michael Robertson</a> and his head of sales Greg Flores, the initial idea was to simply purchase the domain name MP3.com and set up a redirect to filez.com. When ad revenue and large amounts of traffic began to flow into the domain name because of web searches, a decision was made to use the domain to feature unsigned "indie" musicians, and musicians in the thriving techno genre.

A Musician's Utopia

Musicians flocked to the site, leading to a concentration of talent, creativity, and a real sense of community. Those who were there in the early days still remember sensing that they were part of something that was on the edge of changing the music business in a profound way.

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MP3.com logo, circa 1999

For artists, it was exciting, completely self-empowering, and unlike any other creative experience ever. You could have an idea in the morning, record a demo at noon, send your track to someone halfway across the globe to add vocals or an instrumental part, and put your work up in evening for the world to hear. The management of MP3.com seemed to understand the importance of this vibrant artistic community, in submitting an ad to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Grammy magazine in 1998:

What the whole world listens to…Future Grammy winners found here

The beginning of the end

When MP3.com went public in 1999, the stock sale raised over $370 million, which was a record for an Internet IPO at that time. To motivate the musicians on the site, the management began a promotion called Pay for Play which paid a "promotional fee" to each artist based on their monthly streams and downloads...Oddly, this was the beginning of the end.

Why? For many reasons. The first of which was that, like the Devil's contract with Faust, the Pay for Play deal with too good to be true. It wasn't a royalty: it was a promotion which could be halted at any time. But since people had already given royalty-free licenses to their music to the site in the first place, that drawback didn't seem like a big deal. What should have happened at this point is that MP3.com should have started paying into Performance Rights Organizations such as BMI and ASCAP to cover regular performance and mechanical royalties. But since they already had a free license, they could not be persuaded to do this by a bunch of unsigned artists. And when the paychecks started coming, it seemed like a very good deal indeed.

Some people started making lots of money. As in, enough money to live on. Certain stars emerged such as <a href="http://www.lindhe.com/bassic.html">Bassic</a> who got written up in some mainstream news magazines, <a href="http://www.myspace.com/303infinity">303Infinity </a>who ruled the Techno charts, and even some big names like Alanis Morissette, who was closely associated with the site in 1999. And everybody wanted a piece of that pie... even people whose music wasn't likely as good as those who were up there at the top of the charts. So, the game changed. Music making became a sideline.

The new game : phony fights, faked stalking, sex, and DRAMA = traffic

The first thing that people noticed was that drama led to attention, which in turn led to downloads and streams. So, the message boards which had previously been about collaboration opportunities, trying out songs, and socializing, now began to be about creating fights (real or imagined), insults, trolling, and baiting others. People started using off-site message boards to try to get people to visit their site, polluting Usenet groups with endless insults, off-topic questions, and other ploys to get people to click those links. People pretended to get into fights with other artists and also pretended that other artists were stalking them. Several people posted nude photos to pornography groups, with links to their MP3.com pages. Anything to get people talking.

Bending the rules and bending the facts = better product placement and more power

Secondly, people figured out that music placed in certain categories did better than if it were placed in other categories. The techno charts ruled the site, but there was still money to be made in out-of-the-way places such as the Classical or World Music charts. A Mexican pianist named <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Ernesto+Cortazar">Ernesto Cortazar</a> discovered that placing his Muzak-inspired versions of such golden hits as "Strangers in the Night" in the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_music">Romantic classical</a>" category led to much higher traffic. His rather lame excuse was my music makes you feel romantic. He made a killing at MP3.com, but the stable of concert pianists was always trying to boot him off of the classical charts. However, Ernesto's status as a high money-maker made him immune to any sensible rules about what music belonged in the classical music genre.

A little help from your friends = Cabals for fun and profit

Then came the "gamers" or those who "cracked the code": although the MP3.com system examined the IP addresses where the listening and streaming came from (to prohibit people from streaming their own songs), they couldn't examine all of the data. People quickly figured out that although their own listens didn't count for themselves, their listens for "friends" did. Around the same time, MP3.com launched a promotion called "New Music Army" which allowed people to make money by promoting other artists. The people who had "rosters" to promote would distribute all of their artists' playlists, which they would encourage recipients to stream several times a week. Many people streamed these playlists on multiple computers all day, with the sound turned off.

The Script Kiddies made profit a question of point and click

As to be expected, somebody wrote an automatic script which could play all of the songs on a cabal's playlist automatically, but which played them only for the amount of time necessary to get "credit" before going to the next one. There were rumors of entire blocks of computers running playlists automatically at various server locations. MP3.com tried to catch those who were cheating and did manage to ban some of them, but there was no way that they could ban everyone. And since the site traffic soared and ad revenue went through the roof, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal?

The sausage factory, version 1.0

Finally, people figured out that you didn't actually have to make music to get into the game. You could simply record your girlfriend moaning erotically, or you could mindlessly convert to mp3 format any MIDI files found on the web and upload those. And by this point, it didn't really matter. Nobody was listening anyway... at least, not many people. In November 2000, Salon.com wrote an article entitled <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2000/11/30/download_trading/print.html">Whoring for Downloads</a>, which spoke of a woman who traded downloads of her song for a porn video on adult sites, and another woman who described her "song" 90 seconds of ecstasy as:

"90 seconds of my ecstasy as I make myself come. This is the real thing! When I scream as I come loud with the mic near my face, you can even hear the sounds of my breasts slapping against each other and I go wild with pleasure."

This was rather far from the actual act of making music, but it did indeed get lots of streams and downloads. What used to be vibrant artistic community became a mindless factory of worthless content which was mainly comprised of <a href="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/02/036_4_Super_Robot_Deluxe_-_Delicious_Bobotronic.mp3">porn</a>, machine-generated copies of public domain material, and <a href="http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/LG/Background/Background_-_Alien_Abduction.mp3">some of the most mind-bogglingly bad music ever produced anywhere</a>. Much of the music became so bad that Time magazine featured <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,128113,00.html">a story on the phenomenon in their May 27, 2001 issue.</a>

The disillusioned old guard

The artists who were there at the beginning and who were there during those very exciting first few months took these developments badly. There was a great sense of something unique (perhaps unique in the history of Western music) that had gone terribly wrong and a sense of being caught in the middle of a boring and pointless game.

One of the the most evocative and direct responses to this situation is a song by the artist Dyonisos <a href="http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=105722&songID=719567">Play my song list again, my friend</a> which sums up the aggressive atmosphere, the drama, and the endless quest for "more hits! more hits!" -- not musical hits, but simply hits on the play buttons on the artist pages, like so many mice running through a maze and hitting a button to get a reward. In other words, the tool became the master and the original usefulness of the tool became an activity which replaced the entire point of the exercise. What should have set musicians free became a depressing prison, where one spent one's days promoting music to people who weren't listening, except if you clicked their buttons.

Reality rears its ugly head

And the management of MP3.com? They were at the head of an extremely popular website, at the effective control of the largest online music catalog ever amassed which had a huge potential value, making lots of ad revenue as well as other revenue from a commercial music service. They were seen as the movers and shakers who were changing the face of the music industry. They had an army of non-salaried worker bees who drove endless streams of traffic and content to their site. They made money off of ads, from album sales, and other promotions. They were the new guys who were calling the shots. And because they were at the top of the food chain and at the helm of the hot new technology, they got cocky. And then they made a huge mistake.

The name of this mistake was "Beam it". This was a service which allowed users to convert CDs that they had purchased into MP3 format, directly onto the MP3.com servers, and then play them from a personal "locker" on the MP3.com site. Up until this point, MP3.com had not been attacked by the major record labels for copyright infringement because nobody really knew whether or not the law covered the types of uses that MP3.com was pioneering. This time, however, the majors felt that here they had a clear case of unauthorized duplication and therefore a strong case.

MP3.com hid behind the concept of "fair use", giving as an argument that only music which had already been purchased was stored on their servers, as well as their idea that because they were cutting edge and providing a new service, these attacks would not be successful. All of the recording companies, save one, accepted an "out of court" settlement. The outlier was Universal, and they wanted their day in court. Universal won the case easily: the first line of the UMG v MP3.com decision reads as follows :

"The complex marvels of cyberspatial communication may create difficult legal issues; but not in this case. Defendant's infringement of plaintiff's copyrights is clear,"

So much for being "cutting edge" as a defense ploy...

MP3.com was then sold to Vivendi, who had already been given a large amount of stock in their out-of-court settlement. Not wanting to have to pay for a lot of unsigned artists whom they had no intention of signing, the "Pay for Play" program became the Premium artist service or PAS (with the worst promotional slogan ever: PAS is a GAS!), in which you had to pay to get paid. Then predictably, the payments to artists were phased out.

Pavlov was right

What was extremely odd was that the behavior of the artists after the payment incentive was discontinued remained the same. People still did all of the old empty rituals to get to the top of meaningless charts which no longer meant anything. It was as if they were addicted to the same meaningless tasks they had undertaken to get the cash and it no longer mattered whether or not there was a financial incentive.

The end of the world's largest archive of free online music

Finally, Vivendi (the owner of UMG) had enough and sold the entire operation to CNET. <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/15/hungover_cnet_wakes_up_next/">As Andrew Orlowski put it in his Register article</a>, this was a bit like waking up in bed with someone that you don't remember going home with... and CNET decided to do the sensible thing and wipe the servers clean. Thus ended the largest collection of online music ever amassed in one place. While I find the comparison a bit exaggerated, I found the fact that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com">Wikipedia's article about MP3.com</a> links to the article about the Destruction of the Library of Alexandria to be a fitting tribute to the spirit in which the site was founded.

And the beat goes on...

Well, we're in the POST web 2.0 world now, you say? We're past all of that!

Are we really? The crucial difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, according to Andrew Odlyzko's 2001 article <a href="http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications2.pdf.">Content is not King</a> is the idea that communication is more important than content, or in other words traffic is more important than thought. And this idea seems to underline the entire transition from music to traffic which characterized the MP3.com experience from the artist's perspective. However, on another level, it was a transition from using tools to being used by tools. Isn't this second image close to what Web 2.0 is becoming?

The failure of the artists to see that everything they had created in the context of the site could be and would be destroyed at the whim of site management, the mindless creation of content to generate traffic rather than to provoke reaction and thought, and site management who feel immune from attack because of their position as the next big thing... aren't all of these issues alive and well at our favorite Web 2.0 sites? And since the genesis of these sites and the current processes are so strikingly similar, how can the final outcome be any different?

Image credits:

• Photo of Michael Robertson, <a title="James Duncan Davidson" href="http://duncandavidson.com/" target="_blank">DuncanDavidson.com</a>, all rights reserved, used with permission.
• MP3.com logo, <a title="MP3.com logo, Fair use" href="http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107" target="_blank">fair use doctrine</a>.