Note: For the legally squeamish, I shall be referring to two fictional torrent trackers: "squeak" and "pancakes". The rest of you can just deal.
Once upon a time, I was one of the music industries greatest customers. When I was in highschool I'd make a weekly pilgrimage to the big record-store downtown and spend hours scouring the racks for tunes. I'm old/young enough that, at first, it was tapes, but I later progressed to CD's. My earliest albums are all popular well known artists, but I soon began to branch out into other genres that were, at the time, marginal. Classical. Electronica. You name it.
In the late nineties I started using Napster and a variety of other sharing sites, but sweet, glorious usenet above all else. Sure, you needed luck and a commerical usenet account to find what you wanted but, if you could find it, it would download. (rather than sitting at 32% like so many file sharing networks of the day!) It was like a smorgasboard. You could just download things at random and find yourself on journeys of musical discovery. I was still buying a lot of albums in those days. Primarily albums from groups I discovered through usenet but hadn't been able to find anywhere. (These were often ordered through the mail.)
I always felt a little guilty about hanging onto digital copies of albums I had downloaded without buying, but I figured things balanced out since I was really spending more money than I could afford on music anyways. Then, Metallica started suing people and Napster got shut down. Usenet was still fine, but suddenly the relationship between artists and fans was tainted. I know it's not justifiable. It's illegal, immoral, whatever. But I haven't bought a single album, online or otherwise, since that day. I can't explain it, but suddenly a group I loved was calling me a thief. I realized it was true, and strangely enough, I stopped caring.
For a while I continued downloading music through usenet, but that phase sort of waned. So much was being posted there that it was taking hours a day to sift through just the lossless groups. For every great new track I found, I found hundreds of tracks I loathed. I'd find artists that cut one decent song in their careers and then nothing but crap. My music collection stood still for several years.
Then squeak came along. Instead of passively sipping from the usenet garden-hose, you could actively search for music that interested you. Squeak had almost *everything*. Odds were that, if you could think of it, squeak had it. Unlike open torrent trackers like TPB or the various sharing networks that came before, the closed ratio-enforced nature of squeak ensured that whatever you did find downloaded nearly as fast as if was coming off of usenet. The comments people posted to torrents were frequently a goldmine of information for finding new music too. My collection expanded quite a bit during these years.
Then, one day, squeak was shut down. I really felt cut off from music that day. iTunes was going strong, but even they had relatively little compared to squeak and, at the time, the quality of their lossy AAC tracks was poor compared to the lossless that was so easy to find on squeak. I realized that squeak really was something special, and just as I used to pay a monthly fee for usenet I'd have gladly paid a monthly fee for Oink. Why couldn't the record industry find some way to provide that service and take my money? I didn't feel guilty about pirating music, but I did feel weary of moving around trying to find music in the "old ways".
A little while later, while casting about for an oink replacement, I got an early account on "pancakes", but it sucked. There was nothing there. It felt like a refugee camp, except all the cool people had gone to some other, cooler camp and this one was for the rejects. Eventually, I despaired and went through another dark, period of zero-musical discovery. My original pancakes login was soon forgotten.
A while back, somebody sent me an invite to pancakes and I figured it was worth another look. What a difference a year or so had made! The selection was still not up to squeak's standards, but pancakes was doing some new things that were exciting. The front page was filled with well-written articles on obscure genres. Bands were actually releasing albums here! Obscure, unheard of bands, and they were getting their music out to thousands all around the globe. Instead of feeling like I should feel guilty, I felt good when downloading bands that wanted their music out there. I'd pass their stuff around to friends and some of them would wind up really enjoying it.
So what does the future hold? I feel pancakes is on the right track, provided they can avoid being sued into non-existence like squeak. There is definitely an opportunity here for artists. Perhaps not the sort that will generate filthy lucre in the traditional sense... How many bands really wind up doing a lot better than breaking even with the record companies anyways? We're also beginning to see music (e.g. Kleptones) that is flat out illegal due to copyright law, yet of genuine artistic merit. Some artists are learning to live outside the law, and we're all richer for it.
For better or for worse, file-sharing is here to stay. Commercial services like iTunes will probably also thrive, provided they keep their prices realistic. However, does there really have to be two streams of music? One legal, and one not? Can we not find a way to bring services like pancakes into the fold without forcing them to drastically cut their selection by requiring them to work out deals with individual idiotic labels? Like squeak before it, I would gladly pay for pancakes. For me, it's no longer a matter of wanting to go legitimate. I just don't want to find myself cut off again.
Although I have mentioned feeling guilty about not paying for music, I am in Canada, and I have not explicitly broken the law by downloading music. Here, there are levies on blank media, such as CD-Rs, mp3 players, etc. that go to artists, and downloading music is legal here as a direct result. (Something that CRIA is desperately trying to change, since the DMCA worked out so wonderfully in the U.S..) Perhaps it would work if legislation were enacted that would allow sites like pancakes to operate legally by collecting monthly fees from users and distributing the proceeds directly to artists according to download-share, whether those artists have agreed to such a relationship or not. Sort of a, "Fuck you guys, here's your money" relationship. It would be a lot like iTunes, ironically...
I know, I know. I'm reaching here. A lot of people are now so opposed to the record label's legal bullshit that they couldn't stomach a cent of their money going to them. Still, I think we've reached a point where RIAA, CRIA, etc. have demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to come to terms with market realities and build a mutually respectful relationship with their customers. I'm a canuck, so I believe in the judicious intervention of government in industry. (The same sort of thing that has kept our banks solvent and bail-out free!) Call me dirty names like socialist if you want, but socialism in moderation works.
Where does that leave labels? Artists are still going to need help producing albums and setting up tours. Maybe it really should be harder for up and coming artists to get millions into debt for a fancy first-album. Maybe they should have to do some cheap, basement albums first to get the cash up for a slick and glossy production. It would certainly reduce the number of artists who wind up in debt-for-life to the labels. Instead of controlling the artists, maybe the labels should be providing a service to artists. If the artists get their money directly from pancakes, iTunes, etc., they will be the ones with the power, not the labels. That scares the hell out of the labels, but I like the idea myself.