A number of artists and songwriters seem to be doing their best to ensure that the free file sharing services like Kazaa and LimeWire continue to do a booming business:
- The world's largest music company had been hectoring rock singer Tom Petty since last summer. You've got a big and popular catalogue of albums, Universal Music Group said. We've got to put them up for sale on the Internet — they're being traded free every day on the Web and we're all losing money.
He should have been an easy sell. The Internet-savvy Petty let fans download one of his songs back in 1999. After some haggling, he and Universal agreed to make almost all of his songs available for purchase online.
But Petty's fan's did not get everything they wanted. Online buyers will not get their hands on Petty's outtake songs, studio tunes that rarely made it onto albums and are craved most by many hardcore fans. Petty controls the rights to those songs, unlike the bulk of his songs, which are owned by Universal, and he held them back for fear of diminishing the value of a 1995 CD boxed set that included them.
The Petty case underlines the complexity of buying and selling music online. A hornet's nest of performance and publishing copyright laws, marketing decisions, artists' egos and negotiating power plays can stop people from legally buying songs on the Internet, just as millions are trying to do so for the first time.
....But fans who venture onto any of the pay music sites will not find the most popular band ever, the Beatles. They will not find other top-selling acts, such as the Dave Mathews Band, Garth Brooks, the Grateful Dead, AC/DC and the Cars.
They will find that top-selling acts Madonna and Red Hot Chili Peppers sell their songs by the album, but not as singles.
They will find some musicians on one service, but not on others. They will find puzzling choices: Led Zeppelin fans can buy a 47-minute spoken-word biography of the band online, but no Zeppelin songs because the band has not licensed them for sale on the Internet.
....EMI's biggest act, the Beatles, remains intransigent. EMI distributes the Beatles' songs but the group's performance rights are owned by the band members and spouses. (Michael Jackson owns the publishing rights.) EMI has held numerous meetings with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and the rest of the tight group that controls perhaps the most-loved songs in the pop canon. So far the group remains unswayed. It is not surprising; the Beatles were among the last artists to license their songs for sale on CD, in the 1980s. "We hope they agree to make their works available very soon, " EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer said.
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
i see a story at cnn indicating that 532 more people have been sued.
2 - Al Barger
Also, consider that the "legal" services are in many cases offering the stuff they DO offer in various restricted forms and formats, wma and copy-protected crap, even if you're willing to pay. That makes these pay files distinctly inferior to what you can get for free every day on the net.
3 - BB
If I peer into my crystal ball it tells me there will always be a market for free file sharing. Even when pay-per-use downloading goes mainstream, free file sharing will be continue to be a useful medium for new musicians to promote their wares.
4 - Jim Carruthers
The future of music and file sharing? It ain't the RIAA, it is roll your own:
The music making market continues to grow, and with the addition of software like Garageband, a new market is being created.
Look how long the majors ignored hip-hop. The new music market is all about using the network to make and distribute music using P2P sharing.