Musicians held recording session strikes in the 1940s, convinced that the growing popularity of vinyl would ruin the live concert business, then by far the largest revenue source for artists. The Internet, however, has terrified labels for understandable reasons. A downloaded song is typically a near-perfect digital copy of the original and can be sent to thousands of computer users with relative ease. It is far from a foregone conclusion that we'll deliver unprotected content in the future. Napster, the most popular MP3 swapping program today, allows users to download thousands of songs, free of charge, which are stored on other users' hard drives.
Nobody knows exactly how much music piracy has cost the industry.
Last week the RIAA cited a study indicating that Napster and other services have slashed record sales by 13 percent in stores near colleges, where Napster is most popular. With all those people getting music for free, somebody is not paying for music. Before turning the Internet into a moneymaking casbah, however, the industry must overcome a gantlet of obstacles, some of its own making. And there are countless ways for the industry to botch its forays online, either by pricing songs too high, or slapping annoying restrictions on legally downloaded songs, or presenting a confusing maze of retailers and technologies. Fine-tuning prices and systems could take years and it will challenge the often sclerotic corporate music world, a mutually suspicious network of artists, retailers, labels and hardware makers.