- Assess the social, economic and political impact of the MP3 file format.
The one who is often cited as the inventor of the mp3 format is Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany. In the early 1980’s, as a doctoral student at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuerenberg, he was working on the problem of transmitting music over a digital ISDN phoneline. He never suspected the immense impact it would have.
With the creation of the mp3 file format, file-sharing software quickly began to emerge, and with it different social on-line environments.
Study by Cooper and Harrison
IRC, DC++, etc
In this kind of software, social hierarchy is something very important. From the standard users, and users with a little +, to the “chiefs” with an @ in front of their nickname, everybody is judged according to its ‘social status. The determination of the social status comes from a combination of socioeconomic factors. These encompass your generosity and value addition to the channel (hard drive space, bandwidth, Internet speed, amount of information to share, trust)
Study by Adar and Huberman
Gnutella, Edonkey, FastTrack, Torrents
This sort of file-sharing software allows for an anonymous online file sharing network where hardly any social interactions take place. In such an environment very little sharing actually takes place and this sort of networks would not be able to function if it weren’t for the so-called “power-users”. These are ultimately anti-social environments.
The curious thing is both these studies define users of such software as altruistic ‘citizens’ and self-serving ‘pirates’.
File-sharing software provided music lovers with greater access to free music than ever before, and with it a problem where two different opposing set of ideals emerge.
- Relative social values of freedom to produce and share information
- Protection of authorship and remuneration in culture industries
The combination of easy access technologies and free music provided a cocktail that made people give preference to the first, as this enabled an attitudinal change from people. This change in attitude led more and more people to believe information should be free.
This is an obvious denial of ethical issues surrounding obtaining music and other services on-line. The prevailing dogma is that anything over the internet is free, or at least should be. All these factors contribute to an ethos that encourages universal access to music. As it was recently suggested by music industry commentators, peer to peer file sharing is primarily a social phenomenon, which is ‘almost instinctive behaviour of many internet users’.
Surveys
Pew Internet & American Life Project
- 78% do not believe ‘downloading’ to its own hard drive without paying is stealing
- 61% do not care if its copyrighted or not
Quicktake.com
- 80% do not consider the download or sharing of anything unethical
Anonymous self-report
‘I understand that it might be the same thing as going into a store and swiping a CD, but when on a PC and the song is right there to copy and sample, you don’t see it as taking from somebody’
Simon Shull Foust
‘If I walk into Virgin Records, take a plastic dish and walk out, it’s shoplifting. When I download music without paying, I infringe on the rights of copyright holders. But either way, the music is not stolen, the supply has not decreased, in fact it has increased, and so has the demand.’
Another thing that also motivates people to illegally download mp3’s is the idea of wealthy large corporations that abuse its power. This way ‘downloaders’ don’t even think they are harming an artist, but in fact helping to divulge them without ‘evil’ corporations taking advantage of them.
As it is widely known, the mp3 file format and its evolution with the internet has had severe consequences for the market in the music industry.
The Napster case
The Supreme Court concluded Napster had harmed the market for the works in at least 2 ways:
- by reducing sales of cds
- by raising barriers to plaintiffs’ entry into the market for the digital downloading of music
Napster did not only have negative consequences, in fact some claim the music industry should have seen Napster as an opportunity to expand the music market and helped it become legal. Nevertheless, this opportunity was ceased a few years later. The creation of paid online music services such as Yahoo’s Duet, iTunes, etc, enabled music lovers to purchase media at much reasonable prices. For example one did not have to buy an entire album anymore or pay as much. One can simply buy one song for a fraction of the price of the original album.
Online availability and easy access of MP3’s to the wider public presented the music market’s with another challenge or opportunity, whichever way you choose to see it.
Individual bands took advantage to challenge the dominance of major record companies:
- with much less marketing costs and possible direct feed to fans it was possible to cut out the “middle-men” out of the equation (Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI)
- New trends in music were given the possibility to emerge which mainstream enabling record companies would never invest in
- Creation of small or independent labels (band labels even)
The main feature of the MP3 file format is it has taken away control over the music industry from market leaders.
Bands like Simply Red, The Arctic Monkeys, JCB, Gnarls Barkeley, etc, are a few examples of bands that are proof of this. Nowadays, any band is marketed over the internet whether its through a personal website or through a public website like Myspace.com.
An example of the repercussions of this is for example Universal which has dropped its sales from 40 billion dollars to 30 billion dollars blaming most of the drops on sales on illegal sharing.
The effects on the market as a whole can be said to result in a more horizontal and less hierarchical music industry.
Nevertheless, the problem of intellectual property theft and how to deal with it on a global scale remains.
There have been attempts to tackle copyright violations:
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
This was a way found to restrain the reproduction and distribution of e-books. Something similar has also been used in other kinds of media, namely in the music industry and the pornographic industry (wma, m3u, wpc, avi , mpeg, mov, qt)
It is clear the MP3 file format has had major repercussions not only in the world market of music, but also in the social and political sphere. From the many changed views on the theft of intellectual property, to international legal action, to the way the music market runs, te mp3 file format can be said to have had a significant impact in this ever more globalizing world.
