Yes, video killed the radio star, but the Internet killed copyright infringement laws and artist royalties.
Back in the day, radio was the medium where new artists were discovered and bands made it big. Next came music television, which captivated our attention by pairing visual images and music.
What happened next was more of a devolution than an evolution -- radio stopped operating at the forefront of the music scene. Instead, it began putting the same five songs in rotation every day. MTV forgot about the "M" in its name and replaced music videos with raunchy reality shows in which people perform mindless tasks to win the heart of a MySpace "celebrity" (and yes, I think Dani should have won, too). These changes have reduced our attention spans to that of hamsters (no offense to hamsters) and diminished the importance of music in these media.
Enter the double-edged sword called the Internet -- a cyberspace where our wandering attention is given free rein to change focus as fast as our high-speed connection allows.
Just as the Internet is an optimal place for our fast-clicking fingers, it is also now a prime place for bands to break out. Music videos are expensive to make, and it's nearly impossible for new bands to get their demos on the radio. However, anyone can create a web site and upload their songs online. Although MySpace seems largely reserved for people with a special fondness for taking zoomed-in pictures of their reflections, it's a great way for bands to gain exposure and get their tracks heard, as are other sites like PureVolume, where bands can create their own pages and upload songs. It's even becoming trendy to discover bands through these sites. Drop Dead, Gorgeous got their first record deal with Rise Records after industry reps found them through MySpace.
Even for established bands, sites like these are useful. Veteran bands can post tour dates, announcements, pictures, new songs and music videos and then see comments from their fans.
Unfortunately for the music industry, the Internet also fosters file sharing, illegal downloading and ticket scalping. The Internet is one of the few cases where sharing is not caring. This was a huge issue when Napster was sued in 1999 and shut down in 2001. While many music fans quickly moved on to other file sharing services and forgot about the whole uproar, artists and industry execs continue to worry about the future of their jobs and whether fans will still buy CDs. Many bands lament illegal downloads of their music and their labels' inability to counteract such piracy.
Then you have a band like Radiohead, who completely defy convention by making their most recent album "In Rainbows" available for digital download at a price their fans were allowed to choose. Despite the novelty, Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood did not intend the move to be show of support for illegal downloading.
"There's something about it that's deeply wrong because it's something you worked on and you're giving it away for free, but you want to do something that's of the moment and immediate and share with people because that's what you're excited about now, not next year as part of a full-blown album release," rambled Greenwood in an interview published in NME last October, "and you want to do something that's not part of iTunes or something, or corporatization, turning the Internet into a record company."
The question arises of whether music should be free and shared among everyone, but as the artists who create the music will tell you, hard work and money went into creating that music. As technology continues to advance, so will the ways music is distributed and heard. In a lot of respects, the advent of the Internet was great for musicians, but people's exploitation of the Internet is harming the artists and industry more severely than many realize.
Divya is a staff writer for The Mirror.
