thePULSEThink paying for CDs helps musicians? Think again.
2 young Worcester activists target the record industry
Look out music industry. Here comes Reville and Wilson.June 2004 – Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson are either completely brilliant or completely insane. The two young activists have launched an against-all-odds attack on a powerful American behemoth that some say lays waste to all it encounters. They rely on passion, faith and a little bit of luck to chalk up big wins for their makeshift rebellion and force what they see is a change that is long overdue.
“Last summer,” explains Reville, 25, “we followed very closely all the news of file sharing and home CD burning and its supposed effect on the music industry. When the tone became one of ‘How are we going to save the music industry?’ we began talking about how terrible musicians, fans and the culture have had it for so long. That’s when we suggested that maybe we shouldn’t save the music industry — maybe it’s time to get rid of the major labels and build a more fair and independent music business.”
At the end of August 2003, after having done extensive research on the ways in which the major record labels were claiming that P2P [peer-to-peer] networking was destroying them, Reville and Wilson began to mount their offensive. The website, philosophy and corporate thorn DownhillBattle.org was born.
“The story was entirely one-sided,” Reville says firmly, “driven by lobbyists, the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] and the individual labels. To us, it’s not an Internet issue. We feel that the changes we propose will actually improve music.”
A week later, they had been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, and so their plan to “shift the press”, as Reville puts it, began in earnest.
“It was rather easy to respond to all the [propaganda] points,” Wilson, 24, says, “and we quickly realized how much of an information vacuum there was.”
The escalation of record companies’ filing devastating legal suits against so-called “P2P pilferers” paralleled the DownhillBattle.org guys’ rise to prominence. Each provided the other with an endless list of what is wrong with the music industry. While Reville and Wilson do not deny that file sharing has caused record sales to decline, they did refute (from their inception) Apple’s claim that its iTunes Music Store was fair to artists. Their actions led to the striking of all references to fairness to artists from the iTunes website in October 2003.
While Reville and Wilson do not deny that file sharing has caused record sales to decline, they did refute (from their inception) Apple’s claim that its iTunes Music Store was fair to artists.
They say it best on their brilliant “iTunes iSbogus” parody site on DownhillBattle.org: “People are paying for songs on the iTunes Music Store because they think it’s a good way to support musicians. But iTunes misses a huge opportunity. Instead of creating a system that gets virtually all of fans’ money directly to artists — finally possible with the Internet — iTunes takes a big step backwards. Apple calls iTunes ‘revolutionary’ but record companies are using the service to force the same exploitive and unfair business model onto a new medium.”
Eleven cents out of every 99-cent iTunes download goes to the artist, a cut that is hardly equitable, though still much better than the traditional industry model. Wilson broke down the model for me: “The problem with an artist signing with one of The Big 5 [Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, The EMI Group, Warner Brothers Music and BMG Entertainment] is that it takes an average of 100,000 sales before an artist makes his or her first royalty. Even then, the amount [an artist] would receive from each CD sold is around $1.00 on a CD that retails for $17.00.”
So what business model would they like to see the industry follow — after the industry is destroyed and rebuilt, that is? Talk with these guys for a few minutes, and you come to expect a radical yet sensible and intelligent answer: “One proposal we like a lot is called ‘voluntary collective licensing’,” Wilson says. “VCL would allow ISP’s [Internet service providers] to license unlimited downloads to a subscriber for a set monthly fee of, say, $5.00, and the money would be distributed accordingly, routed directly to musicians.”
“And there are already royalty tracking organizations that keep tabs on what’s being played on the radio and on TV,” Reville adds, “so it’s just a matter of the major labels saying yes.”
While The Big 5 is starting to embrace digital downloading — and you can thank/blame iTunes proprietary encryption for soothing that ornery beast — don’t expect that “yes” to come overnight, even as the industry struggles to replace the income lost to P2P. “Their long-standing system is based on control,” Wilson says, “and the only way to stay in business is by controlling distribution, promotion, and radio. They are beginning to see, though, that a proposal like VCL can level the playing field.”
“In a lot of ways,” he continues, “there’s nothing new about what we’re saying, and neither is the frustration that so many people have felt with the major label system. In the late ’70’s, punk culture rebelled against The Establishment, including the major labels. What’s different now is that those labels are truly vulnerable. The Internet is a great tool to circumvent their control, and for the first time, things can change.
