SONIC PRODUCT MANIFESTO

I. The Problem with Music These Days
II. What is Sonic Product?
III. A Brief History of Sonic Product
IV. Breaking the Container: The Rise of Digital Music
V. Mediapocalypse: The Global Jukebox
VI. Context as Content: The New Music Industry

THE PROBLEM WITH MUSIC THESE DAYS

Music is in crisis. Artists, listeners and the industry are experiencing a complex array of problems. These problems are mostly due to the extent of which the industry has commercialized the interaction between artist and listener, and its subsequent failure to adapt to new technology, specifically digital music.

Creativity has been converted into commodity, perception into product. Using the apparatus of copyright law, a small number of corporations have engineered a lockdown on access to music for purposes of producing wealth. Their entire profit model has been based on compelling listeners to purchase a product that will grant them access to music.

This corporate juggernaut grew rapidly throughout the 20th century and consolidation has led to a vastly unbalanced concentration of power. Currently, just four media conglomerates dominate the record industry. In broadcasting, only two companies are responsible for the majority of radio stations. MTV is not only a monolithic source of music video, it is the most-watched television channel on the planet. This uneven convergence of power corrupts every other aspect of the music industry, from ticket sales to retail, distribution to media. More disturbingly, it leaves artists and listeners - arguably the soul of the industry - virtually powerless.

For over a century, the industry produced increasingly extraordinary profits without challenge until digital music made its debut. The explosion in peer-to-peer file sharing ushered in by Napster was the industry's wake-up call to the inevitability that the Internet would become the ultimate medium for music. The possibility of universal access to music rendered the old business model obsolete.

In the face of the rapid pace of technological innovation, the industry initiated a two-part strategy to maintain control over access to music. Backed by a century of copyright and corporate legislation, they systematically sued or bought out the creators of digital music technology. In turn, technological innovation in digital music slowed to a crawl, stuck in a legal quagmire. This has bought the industry time to pursue their ultimate goal: not to adapt their business model to the Internet, but to adapt the Internet to their business model.

A redistribution of power from the industry to the artist and listener is long overdue, and digital music offers a window of opportunity. Unfortunately, there is a general lack of awareness as to the potential present in the future of music. What is required is a unifying concept that redefines our understanding of how music is created, transmitted and perceived. We call this unifying concept sonic product.

Music cannot be bought or sold, possessed or distributed. We think of records, CDs and MP3s as 'music', but in fact they are merely containers for music. These containers are manufactured by the music industry, sealed by copyright law and sold to the public as if the containers were the music itself. Actually, what's being sold is access to the music inside the container.

Try this: hum a song. Now grab a pen and try to write a price the song you just hummed. In order to write a price on music, it must first be put into a container. The recording is the container. You could certainly charge admission to anyone within earshot of your voice, but that also consists of charging for access to a container. The container in this case is the area you are performing in.

It wasn't always this way. Roughly a hundred years ago, prior to the introduction of recording technology, the artist and the listener were bound together in time and space. Without recordings, the artist's creation and the audience's perception were simultaneous and inseparable experiences. The idea of listening to an orchestra performance in one's living room seemed preposterous. Only through concert halls and commissioned compositions did any music business exist at all. Without recordings, music could only be created and experienced through performance. Without containers there would be nothing to sell, no music industry.

Sonic product is the intermediary between artist and listener. Sonic product is the music container with the price written on it. Music only exists when you hear it, sonic product is merely a medium to transport and sell the music. On the radio or the computer, at the club or on the jukebox - it's all sonic product. You can only hear music in your head, through your ears. As T.S. Eliot said, "You are the music while the music lasts."

The phonograph was invented in 1877. Jukeboxes became popular in the 1890s. At the turn of the century, developments in record and turntable technology spurred consumer demand for recordings, and the record industry began in earnest. Radio developed in the 1920s as a competitor to the record industry. Record companies tried to ban their artists from performing on what they considered a rival medium. As radio quality improved, record sales plummeted.

The record industry responded by increasing audio fidelity with the introduction of electrical amplification, and continued to improve recording and playback technology throughout the century. Music containers continued to grow more sophisticated by leaps and bounds. It was not until the cassette tape entered the mainstream in the late 1960s that the industry began worrying about music sharing. Radio provided free access to music, but that access was temporary and fleeting. The potential to copy and swap music on cassette allowed the listener to circumvent the industry and gain access to music for free. A blank tape was essentially an empty container that could be filled by the listener.

Though a Copyright Statute had been passed in 1909, the law was mainly used by the industry to settle disputes over ownership with the artist, not the listener. With the 1971 Sound Recording Amendment, Congress acknowledged that sound recordings were eligible for copyright protection. Though the industry claimed the Amendment was necessary to curb record bootlegging, the true impetus was to control cassette copying, which the industry blamed for a slump in sales. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lobbied for and eventually received the right to collect a tax on blank cassettes to offset music sharing. This tax was distributed among the labels, not the artists.

In 1979, the Walkman was introduced and music sales figures rose even higher. It was clear that the ability to record freely to cassette and have portable access to music was a positive technological innovation that benefited the industry and the listener. New cassettes still sold well because copies of cassettes were inferior products with degraded sound quality and no album art. Morbidly fixated on their profit margins, corporations ignored the economic and cultural benefits; as far as their profit model and business philosophy was concerned, each instance of free access to music was a criminal act of theft. Realizing the difficulty and expense in prosecuting music fans, they opted to improve technology in a way that would offer greater value to the listener while preventing them from sharing the music for free.

In the early eighties, the compact disc hit the market and generated the highest sales figures the record industry ever experienced. People rushed to replace their vinyl collections with the first digital music medium. The improvements in audio fidelity, durability and size of the CD outweighed the value of music sharing with the cassette. By 1985, the CD player had been adopted by a million listeners. In the Golden Age of music marketing, the industry enjoyed a rapid growth in revenues, a technologically superior medium and dominant control over access to sonic product. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of continued prosperity.

It happened quickly and caught a lot of people off guard. Personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web - the Digital Age had arrived. In 1990, recording technology made a quantum leap forward with the introduction of the MP3. Until this point, music was generally not regarded as information but rather a tangible physical object such as a record or CD. The MP3 compressed music into a digital package that was small enough to be transferred between computers connected to the Internet. Coupled with the MP3, the Internet would soon become the new medium for music. The music media of the past consisted of mass produced music containers. The Internet was essentially a single global music container. This distinction would eventually define the current conflict in music.

We must remember that the Internet of the nineties was far different than it is today. Without widespread broadband access, the Internet mainly existed for browsing websites with simple text and pictures. Streaming audio was introduced in 1995 and more listeners were drawn to the Internet as a source for music. It was still fairly expensive to distribute large amounts of digital music and those who did were quickly met with cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA. Besides the hordes of unsigned acts made available through early digital music websites like the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) and MP3.com, access to digital music was still effectively restricted by both legal and technological constraints.

When CD burners surfaced, the RIAA lobbied for and again received a tax on digital recording technology to offset music sharing with the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. Despite or perhaps because of the rapid pace of technological innovation in the 1990s, the music industry approached the Internet with a mixture of reluctance and confusion. With the record, the cassette and the CD, the industry set the pace for innovation in recording technology. MP3s and the Internet were developed outside of their control and built to do something far more threatening to their business model than simple cassette copying. Digital music was being developed to provide universal access to music over the Internet. For free.

With help from the 1996 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the music industry was able to prevent digital music sharing from entering the mainstream until 1999, when Napster was launched. By networking computers together over the Internet, Napster allowed PC users to share each other's MP3 collections. Hundreds of thousands of listeners joined the network before it was sued into submission and shut down two years after its debut. More advanced computer networks built by underground and overseas software programmers quickly filled the void. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2005 mandated that "one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright" was liable for the infringing use of its users, effectively rendering many peer-to-peer networks illegal. BitTorrent has emerged as the next generation peer-to-peer technology with a decentralized model that is currently being tested by litigation from the industry.

With accountability for music sharing shifting to the listener, the RIAA made its most desperate move to date by suing thousands of individual music fans in a desperate attempt to discourage digital music sharing. They even went so far as to demonize these DCMA violators by publicly calling them 'music pirates.' The industry also hired technology companies to hack into music sharing networks to render them virtually useless. They began manufacturing CDs that could not be transferred to some computers. They could invent no sonic product to compete with the value of the free MP3, so they had to fight against technological innovation.

Many of the victims of the RIAA lawsuits had similar reactions to the charges: "I didn't know what I was doing was wrong." Advances in technology has made file sharing as easy as turning on the computer, typing in a word and downloading a file. It doesn't feel wrong to turn on the radio and listen to music for free. It doesn't feel wrong to make a mix tape or burn a CD and give it to a friend for free. It certainly doesn't feel wrong to download a music file for free. Despite being surrounded by free music, listeners have always been compelled to spend money on sonic product. Free access to music feels right even though the industry and a few overpaid artists insist it's wrong.

In the past few years there has been an incremental downward shift in album sales. The industry blames music sharing for this decline. However, it is clear that DVDs and video games are stealing music's market share. These types of technologically innovative, interactive, rich media represent a better value to the consumer than an $18 CD. In any case, the industry has not produced any hard evidence that music sharing decreases sales, while independent artists continue to find new ways to reap the benefits of file sharing. The popularity of the cassette certainly demonstrated otherwise. In most cases, free music has made sonic product more valuable. It's bad music that devalues a product. Giving good music away only makes people want more of it.

Ultimately, the slump in music sales can be attributed to the industry's inability to integrate music sharing into their business model. Amidst the digital paradigm shift, the industry clutches to its copyright-and-control business tactics. It is engaged in a technological arms race with guerrilla software developers which cannot be won decisively. Attempts at transitioning into a digital business model have been awkward if not vastly unsuccessful. The leading provider of copyright-compliant digital music is Apple, which generally loses money on music sales in order to sell more iPods. Digital music is well on its way to becoming the ultimate music medium, and the recording industry is generally not participating in its construction. It is, in fact, facilitating its own destruction. If file sharing represents a grave threat to their business model, the next technological revolution will be apocalyptic.

Recent technological developments make it possible to circumvent the music container almost entirely. The primary technology behind the transformation of sonic product is the global jukebox, consisting of a network through which the listener can access virtually every recording ever made as well as all new recordings as they are completed. Songs are immediately streamed to the listener's wireless music device, and can be accessed an unlimited number of times at any time in any location. Today's peer-to-peer networks and subscription-based legitimate services like Napster To Go only hint at the possibility of universal access.

As an intermediary between artist and listener, the music industry created containers and controlled access to them. The sonic product is what pays the artists, finances the industry and gets sold to listeners. The fear is that without containers, there is no way to control access to the music inside the containers, no way to make money, and thus no possibility of producing quality sonic product. In fact, relinquishing control over access to music offers boundless new possibilities to make money while simultaneously improving the quality of sonic product, the livelihood of artists and the music listening experience as a whole.

Access to the global jukebox will be free or extremely inexpensive. All music will reside in a single container shared by all listeners. While a global jukebox which is free to access may be technologically feasible, its economic implications obviously terrify the current music industry. Dissolving the concept of music ownership is the antithesis of its business model. As such, the industry likes to give the impression that free access to music will impoverish artists, bankrupt the music industry and therefore prevent the listener from hearing any music at all. Let us assume for the moment this is true.

The majority of musicians currently live in frustrating obscurity, receiving little to no compensation for their work. Some achieve moderate success only to be economically deprived by various elements of the music industry. Musicians are constantly forced to sign away the right to own their own recordings and have little control over shaping the sonic product that contains their music. Those that eke out a decent living are often still exploited. Some musicians even have to join wedding bands.

The average American music listener buys five CDs a year. Beyond their CD collection, they might listen to the radio or watch music television, which both offer a heavy rotation of the same short play list of songs. In this way, the modern music industry is analogous to the fast food industry - there are many choices on the menu, but every location has the same exact set of choices.

Further evidence abounds proving that the industry does not have the best interest of the artist and listener in mind: payola, unfair contracts and accounting, retail price-fixing, radio consolidation, censorship, and let's not forget Muzak. Clearly, the artists and listeners are not benefiting from the current business practices of the music industry. The artist can't get paid fairly and the listener can't fairly pay the artist for access to digital music. There's a big industry blocking the way with litigation and legislation. Our system of copyright and the access-control methodology it supports are too far gone to be revised. The system must be overthrown.

Digital music charges on in the hands of an independent minority, ever threatening to once again introduce music sharing to the zeitgeist as with Napster. So the question is, 'Why can't a multi-billion dollar industry create a more superior sonic product than a few independent rebels?' There is no clear answer, but looking at the evidence, a suggestion emerges: Perhaps the music industry should stop selling containers and get into the technology business.

The reason why containers aren't selling is because the profit model of the culture industry is outdated. During the Industrial Age, technology reshaped our culture to be based on ownership of products. Now, during the Information Age, technology is reshaping our culture to be based on our interaction with those products. Just as a global jukebox renders possession of physical media obsolete, an interaction-based culture renders the concept of intellectual property obsolete.

More so than any other cultural medium, the experience of creating and listening to music is based on interaction and context. In other words, the actual contents of the music container are not important - your relationship to the music and the context in which it is heard is the basis of your experience. Before recording technology, context was fixed. The artist and listener were bound together in time and space. Once the music container was introduced, context suddenly became dynamic. The listening experience was as much concerned with the music itself as the mental and physical environment of the listener.

Musical context will become universal when the global jukebox provides free access to music by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Ownership of music will only truly become and obsolete concept when the global jukebox offers a greater value than subscription services, pay-per-download stores and brick-and-mortar retailers. The music industry will have to adapt their profit model to take advantage of the relationship listeners share with music, the physical and emotional context in which it is experienced.

This is a critical departure from the current music industry, in which context is manufactured by attaching a celebrity image to a musician or band, fortified with corresponding promotions, with the ultimate goal of selling millions of records. Once music containers stop selling, the purpose of creating context will no longer be to move product. The celebrity will be the messenger and the medium will be message. Musical context will essentially be the content of sonic product.

Bottled water illustrates the financial sustainability concept perfectly. Water is essentially free, but a highly profitable industry has developed around the sale of bottled water. Bottled water sells because of context. Just as a music sharer could fill up an iPod with free MP3s, you could fill a bottle of water for free every morning before you leave the house. What you pay for is the convenience and experience of drinking the water in a given context.

Based on selling music as context, a new music industry will grow. Businesses will evolve to help the listener sort through the massive stock of free music to find what they're looking for at any given moment. Though access to music will be free, the sheer amount of music available will create the need for companies to filter the global jukebox per the listener's specifications and stylistic tendencies. New software will evolve to enrich the listening experience -- developments in mood-based music browsing are already underway.

Interactive music promotion will turn fans into components of a grassroots marketing network. Bands and musicians will form a vast network of resources as online communities facilitate career connections. More bands will hit the road to tour as the live musical performance regains popularity. Business will evolve to capture those performances and broadcast them over the Internet. Record companies will be able to keep an exact pulse on listener interest and adjust their marketing and promotion strategies in real time. There may be nothing we can do to save multi-million dollar artists, broadcast radio, music retailers and distributors. The new music industry cannot be built on the old industry's shoulders. It will be built on its bones.