If you're interested in death and black metal, you might find this article interesting. Insightful and music oriented, from deathmetal.org.

I guess most of you have heard about the Pirate Bay trial, and that they where found guilty by the Swedish court. I don't think it is a good thing to steal anything, but I am puzzled by the case against file sharing and especially Pirate Bay. The music industry has a long history in fighting anything that they feel threaten their control over the distribution. They fought against radio, they fought against cassette tapes, they fought against video, and for some years now they have fought against the private use of legally bought CD's and the Internet. It is something not so likable about it all, I say.

According to the music industry, I have committed a crime since my first cassette tape of music. My first crime against the music industry was in the form of a gift from my uncle, and it was a cassette tape copy of Procul Harum.I loved it and played it over and over - but little did I know that I was a hard core criminal at the point. I've later purchased music from Procul Harum, so I guess i've done my repending without even knowing it.

But, I've kept on copying music from friends, and have copied tapes to friends for a very long time. I've recently copied my own CD's into digital formats so I can listen to it through different players, and I've been so evil that I have taken pictures at concerts even though they said I wasn't allowed....(that was a dliberate action, I'm afraid). But do I feel criminal? I can't say I do. All I've done is in the name of enthusiasm over music. I've been a music evangelist for music I love, and I've been eager to listen in on new music. Both the reason for copying music to my friends, and copying music from my friends. I can't say I felt even a sting of guilt by doing this. But since the Internet the music industry has told me over and over again how horrible a crime all this is, so I guess I am guilty in their view.

Reading about the industry taking housewifes to court because of their filesharing of a handfull songs, makes me wonder. They call it "setting an example", and indeed they are. But what kind of example? An example on what you face if you share your music, or an example of a industry so obsessed with control and the money that follows, that they are willing to send a relatively innocent person into life long debts for sharing? Is this the industry crying for their own mother, or is it reflecting the artists will?

My guess is that they protect their industry and corporations - and not the creativity and well being among their artists. And I'll explain why.
 
But Pirate Bay, you can argue, is not an innocent family guy that happened to share his favorite album on the Internet. They call themselves pirates with a cassette scull as their symbol, god dammit!  Yes, I also see this point. They are probably not really that innocent. They know what their doing of course. Even though The Bay doesn't actually have any illigal content, they are quite open about why they do what they do; provide the public with an one track minded and easy way to access torrent based files that by large contain content that you should otherwise be paying for. I do appreciate the right musician's or film producer's have to get paid for their work, and will be first in line to tell people that you should pay for a song if you like it and intend to store it or use it. But I also see that it is very difficult to control this marked like one did before the Internet. And I'm not certain that I want the pre-internet situation back. Are musicians in general really the winners, if no one was allowed to share any of their songs without paying $19,99 for their CD releases? I don't think so. The big names, like i.e. U2, Madonna and Metallica can argue that almost every file share is an economic loss. But a small band from Oslo couldn't argue like that at all. They are probably in the benefitial end of file sharing. By having their music spread virally on the internet, making them famous and even increasing their sales, they probably depend on the viral spread that goes with the file sharing activities. While the big names have a big contract with a global label, a small underground band probably don't. And if we look at the situation before the Internet, their chances of getting a contract with global distribution was next to zero. But with the Internet, and with the wildly spread of torrentfiles they now can "risk" that thousands around the globe will know of them in almost an instant. When that happens they can of course join the crying choir, because they then will have a label and a contract, and enter the world of control and money.

Now, don't get me wrong on this. I do think that it is a very good thing that musicians earn loads of money on what they do. That's not my point. But it is to be said that not all file sharing is of a bad character.

So why try to stop file sharing? It is only one reason for it, and that is money. If you take out money from the formula, everything about file sharing is of the good. It makes it possible for small bands to get distribution, and it makes people more available for new music, because they don't have to buy a song to listen to it to find out if they like it so much that they will pay for the album, or pay for the concert that are being put up for the band. I know this sounds a bit ideal, and I know that many artist disagree with me because in the end what pays for their ability to produce music is the value chain of music distribution. But, and there is a big but, what if the file sharing people really love your music? What if they just use file share to get music they otherwise wouldn't pay for, or that they just want to check out. What if?

Could it be that file sharing is only bad for the establishment of traditional marked control in the music industry? What if the only one loosing in this exchange between artists and the public, are those who have a business modell that depends on having control on what reaches the marked? Should we protect the business modell, or should we protect the creativity and prulalism that follow? That is a retorical question, I know. Of course we want the creativity to benefit. But did it benefit in the pre-internet world? I would say no. The pre-internet system, was dominated by a few big corporations, that had nearly full control of the distribution in record shops, and on the radio. It was only the bands they chose that got attention. To ensure this, the big record companies spend unspeakable sums on marketing and branding, not to mention on copyrighting and other protective instruments. The model didn't fail - we have got a huge number of brilliant artists within the model. But the model did not fit well with free creativity, and I'm convinced that a lot of brilliant artists have been "silenced" by the system, because they didn't get the attention from the controlling coorporations.

There's to many examples to back this statement up, so I won't go into them. But let me use Mayhem as a reference.

Now, Mayhem was not very well liked in the norwegian music industry. We weren't liked in the media industry at large, to be honest. Not even our friend musicians liked what we did. They mostly said we wasted our talent and efforts. Trying to get a contract was beyond any realistic hopes. So what did we do? Confident that we where on to something, we carried on. But we did know that we had to do things on our own, if we should go anywhere.Thx to Øystein, who I must say was the one who made us hang on distribution wise.

So what did we do? Well, we shared. We spend all our spare money on stamps....... We copied music, recorded our own, send it all over the world to likeminded, and got loads of tapes back. Back in the 80ies this was known as the undergorund. And bands like Napalm death, Sepultura and others where a part of that exchange of musics and ideas. Through that we got our name and music known around the world. Without the copying of our tapes that would never have happened. Because there was no way that the establishment in the music industry would've published us. The recording of Deathcrush was, if I recall it correctly, paid for by Necro as a whole. No label was involved, and we shipped it to all corners of the globe. We put out a few copies of the album in London and ended up on top of Kerrangs imported list - someone obviously had made some copies of the record, otherwise we would not have ended up on the list at all. The point is - without the enthusiasm among people around the world, making copies and bootlegs, Mayhem would probably have been a local phenomena in the cold north of Norway. The music industry was certainly not interested in pushing Mayhem forward - to them we was not a likely money maker. And that is what it's all about. The old system is not good for creativity, it's good for money making. If you control the marked and the distribution, you deside what  people get to listen to or not - and that is songs you have the rights on. If you as a band ended up on the "not-list", you might as well just make the band into a cozy hobby or give up. But the Internet have completly changed this.

I guess that Deathcrush is still being copied through portals like The Pirate bay, but so what? It makes more people listening to the album, and probably more buyers of concert tickets and t-shirts.And who knows, probably more people will buy the record than without the fileshare?  According to a survey done by the Norwegian school of economics (BI) this year, people who are active on filesharing are 10 times more willing to pay for the music they like! I rest my case, even though I am pretty sure that the industry will discredit the research for being too light and therefore not trustforthy. Just wait and see.

At a conference in Oslo the other day, one of the speakers said (I think it was Chris Anderson from Wired) that the Internet would not kill music and artists. But it would kill the system of old school music industry labels. I tend to agree.
The old system will fall, sooner or later. Wether the big companies like Warner Music and Sony will fall with it depends on what they do. There are alternative ways of selling music, and there are alternative ways of handling the value chain between artists and the public. There are even an alternative for copyright, namely the very successful Creative commons system.

So what's the conclution on this? Well, I honestly do not know. But something is in the making, and I do hope (and actually think) it is for the best for music. What I do know, is that I don't want the old system back. I do think that there must be something better with the free distribution that todays internet represent, than the old system where label moguls ruled the arena. It might end up with less billionares among artists, but millionares will still be there.

What I do expect, is that the industry will adopt and change. That we will see new business modells emerge, and that the fight against file sharing will be less important, and even something we can laugh about as we do over the industry's attempt to stop video.