A couple weeks ago, I was listening to Bow Wow Wow's "C30 C60 C90 Go" and realized how appropriate the song is today, 20-some years after its release.
It's a tribute to portable cassette players and the beauty of being able to record what you want and carry it with you. The song also promotes the element of being a modern-day pirate.
(The lyrics are on the next page. I couldn't find them anywhere on the internet, so I transcribed them from listening to it. Now the lyrics are on the internet. :-)
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the recording industry was whining about how home taping is killing the music business. Their position was that taping a song off the radio or from your friends' collections meant one less record sold. In fact, if you run across a major-label UK LP from that era, you'll likely see a little logo in the corner showing a cassette with crossbones underneath and the words "Home Taping is Killing Music." This led to a tax being levied on all blank tapes sold in the UK (and maybe in the US, too-- my memory is hazy on this).
Malcolm McLaren (BWW's manager) wrote this song in an attempt to get people to tape more: Be Pirates! Bow Wow Wow's label, EMI, wasn't even aware that this song promoted home taping until someone in the British Phonographic Industry (equivalent to our beloved RIAA) brought it to the attention of corporate executives.
What's interesting is that we've been in the same spot for the past few years with digital music players. If you subsititute "the internet" for "radio" and "iPod" for "cassette" in the lyrics the song suddenly becomes topical. Now the record companies are busting kids for downloading and offering their libraries through KaZaa and similar peer-to-peers.
I'm not advocating piracy on any level. I believe that people should be paid for what they do, whether it's recording an album or brewing a grande soy mocha (don't get me started on tip jars). And usually, when I want to share music with a friend, I will actually buy the CD and give it to them.
My position is that the business model the recording companies have operated under since the industry's beginning (two centuries ago-- well, in the late 1800s) has long since become obsolete. It used to be you'd stick a cylinder or shellac disc on your windup record player so you could hear songs and words from important and/or popular performers of the day. Unless he came to your town, you had no other way of hearing Caruso.
When radio appeared in the 1920s, all sorts of tumult came about because the artists now had another way of getting their work out there. Record companies started failing, and the only way the big ones survived were by being bought out by the companies now established in broadcasting (e.g. RCA, owner of NBC, bought Victor and the Columbia Broadcasting System bought the similarly-named but totally separate Columbia Phonograph Company).
Things were relatively calm until the 1970s when quality home taping equipment suddenly became affordable. The whining which McLaren took as opportunity started.
Fast forward to the late 1990s and you'll find Napster, KaZaa, WinMX, LimeWire, etc. etc. Guess whose collective undies are in a bunch again?
It would seem to me that if I were fighting the same battles every 20-30 years I would look at a different way of doing business.
Enter iTunes and the legal Napster.
According to the Wall Street Journal, iTunes has sold over 70 million downloads since its inception. The jury is out as to whether the venture has been successful, but the general sentiment is that financially it hasn't. From my experience as a consumer, 99 cents a song isn't so bad. I have to say, though, that for every 5 times I go to iTunes or Napster to download a song, 3 of those attempts are unsuccesful because they don't have the song I'm looking for. I usually get the dreaded "partial album" response or no listing for the artist at all.
I like CDs. I like having something tangible with artwork, liner notes, and lyrics that I can put on my table when it's playing and then on my shelf. I may rip the songs to my PC and load them on my iPod, but I like having a complete package that the artist presents as their work. That's something you don't get with a directory full of MP3s. Going all-digital is not the answer.
What should the industry do? I dunno. Hire me, pay me a few million dollars a year, and I'm sure I'll come up with something that's better than what's already there.
