Now even the front page of the New York Times tells us that, just as I've been warning for two years, allowing the record company cartel to run the copyright-approved versions of computerized music delivery will make money only for the cartel, not artists.

According to Neil Strauss's Feb. 18 story (free registration required), artists will receive substantially less than 1 percent of the revenue from Pressplay and MusicNet, which are the download "services" owned by the cartel. What has managers and attorneys scared is that if they are forced to participate in this scam, by the time someone sets up a download system that can accurately be described as providing service, these royalty rates will be enshrined as "standard business practice."

That's the case with the contract provision that requires the term of a record contract to be set at five to seven albums. The artist must be tied up for this long "because that's the way it's always been done."

Pressplay and MusicNet seem to have been set up as separate entities from the record labels partly in order to scam artists. This gives the cartel every incentive to set rates of payment to the record companies it owns as low as possible. That way, the "services" it owns will become profitable sooner, and the record labels the cartel also owns won't have much money to pay out in royalties. Meanwhile, the profits go to the cartel companies. It's a setup Enron might envy.

Now that the veil has been publicly lifted, I suppose James Hetfield and Dr. Dre are as proud of championing intellectual property rights as Edgar Bronfman Jr. himself. As I've also been saying, respect for the copyright system is a trap for artists even more than it is for consumers. Copyright protects the corporations who own the vast majority of copyrights. The result of enshrining copyright, rather than developing a new system that would actually serve creators, makes the record cartel even more impregnable.

The chance to change the old order is rapidly fading. The artists can do very little to help themselves; hell, even those artists who serve notice that the labels don't have the right to include them on their "services" - which they may not - are often ignored.

But consumers can still fight back. The best way is by refusing to do business with the cartel on the Internet. Since neither Pressplay nor MusicNet offers a great selection of material or a reasonable price, why not?

If you buy music at retail, you should be aware that your disc may be "copy-protected," which really means copy-proof. If so, return it as defective. If you are challenged as to whether a copy-proof disc is defective, point out that Philips, the company that developed the CD and under whose license the record companies still operate, says that copy-proof discs are not legitimate CDs and should be labeled differently. The sneak thieves in the cartel won't do that because nobody's going to pay $18 for something that can't be copied.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also thinks you should write to Philips urging the company to go even further and insist that "dysfunctional CDs" be separated from real ones in record stores. That's not a bad idea, but you can send a more effective message by returning them, which will cause the industry all sorts of headaches. If retailers refuse to carry copy-proof discs because their customers won't have 'em, "copy-protection" will join Quadrophonic sound on the dust heap of history.

And whatever you do, don't use Pressplay or MusicNet. They cheat artists.

(c) Copyright 2002 Dave Marsh
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