New Challenges faced by the Music Industry
David Brine
The music industry faces new challenges, both technological and legal, and must learn to embrace, or work with these, while protecting their rights as producers. The new phenomenon of the MPEG Layer 3 encoding (MP3) and the peer-to-peer networks present a challenge to the traditional recording and distribution methods. Before now, there has never been a large-scale piracy network such as exists on the internet now, nor was there such a wide-scale distribution method.
This essay will examine two options that are available on the internet, and compare them. Peer-to-peer networking is one of the major legal stumbling stones in the current environment, and legally it is the focus of the recording industry as a whole, and individual artists. It now reaches beyond the music industry as it once did, but this industry is its major opponent. Another option is a subscription-based "user pays" service, which was championed by private businesses initially, but has since been taken up as a viable option by several recording industry groups.
As a case study for this research project, the company MP3.com seemed to be appropriate. As an example of a subscriber-pays website, MP3.com was one of the first such websites, and despite a spate of lawsuits and threats, it has made use of industry agreements and contacts to become one of the leading internet innovators.
In comparing these two models of sharing music via the internet, they are similar to two creative theories. The peer-to-peer network structure is an example of a network society as outlined by Manuel Castells, and the subscriber model, or Music Service Provider (MSP) model, is comparable with Charles Landry's creative milieu.
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