For utopians, MP3 is a way to liberate music from the clutches of gatekeepers and profiteers, and perhaps to return music to its intangible essence. But the recording business sees MP3 as a Pandora s box of copyright destruction, unleashing anarchy and piracy while robbing musicians of royalties and record labels of capital. In effect, both sides are correct. There s bound to be serious legal scuffling between people who own copyrights and people who believe in the hacker credo that information wants to be free. Yet recorded music is considerably more than a corporate revenue source, and the implications of digital distribution go far beyond the particulars of software and gadgets and royalty collection.
Digital distribution can turn that sentiment into a reality.
And that shift could alter the way music is made, released, sold, stored, and valued. The crux of the problem for recording companies is that they sell music in its physical form, while MP3 permits music s distribution in a non-physical form. First conceived of as a means of allowing independent bands and musicians to post their music online where it might attract a following, MP3 became a headache for the recording industry when music from the name artists they controlled began appearing on MP3 sites, making piracy, the illegal recording and sale of copyrighted material, of high quality recordings a relatively simple task. Not only could users listen to their downloaded music from their hard drives, but they could make their own CDs from MP3 files and play those discs wherever and whenever they wished. Matters were made even worse for the recording companies when manufacturers such as Diamond Multimedia introduced portable MP3 players, freeing downloaded music even from users computers.