STRANGLEHOLD
posted by James Reel
Ah, don’t you love the American “free market”? That’s a euphemism for our obsessive anti-regulatory philosophy, whereby the failure to set national standards actually inhibits technological development, and the failure to get serious about antitrust laws allows a few dominant corporations to dig in and resist change at the expense of the American public.
Why did quadraphonic sound fail in the 1970s? Because the recording industry couldn’t be made to settle on a single technical standard, and the supposedly healthy competition between quad technologies caused those technologies to cancel each other out in the marketplace. How many consumers were going to invest in two completely different playback systems that accomplished the same thing?
Why did stereo AM radio fail in the 1980s? Because the Federal Communications Commission refused to sanction a single AM-stereo technology, preferring to let five competing and incompatible systems to duke it out in the marketplace. Again, consumers didn’t want to take a chance on equipment that could be obsolete in a couple of years (remember Betamax vs. VHS?), and had completely lost interest by the time the FCC got around to approving a single system in 1993.
Then there are the cases in which industry professionals actually do everything they can to hinder change. I’m not just talking about big corporations. At the beginning of World War II, the musicians’ union was so irrationally terrified by the rise of the jukebox—which would supposedly kill live music in bars and nightclubs—that it tried to abort the technology by declaring a complete moratorium on making recordings of any kind.
Fifty years ago, Hollywood bean counters were certain that television would kill the movies; twenty years ago, the threat came from home video. Then it was the video manufacturers who tried, unsuccessfully, to sue video rental stores out of existence. If consumers could rent from a second party, why would they buy from the source?
Well, consumers continue to go to the source for quality goods. People still see movies in theaters, and stay home only when they tire of the crud that Hollywood has been spewing onto postage-stamp screens (which, rather than DVDs and cable TV, is what caused this past summer's box-office slump). People can rent all sorts of movies from places like Casa Video, but they still buy their own DVDs. (In fact, the remarkably strong sales of the DVD version of an obscure, 13-episode TV series called Firefly persuaded Hollywood moguls to turn the show into the very good film Serenity.)
The Recording Industry Association of America is dedicated to protecting the special interests of the nation’s fattest record companies. In the 1960s the RIAA howled that the introduction of blank, record-at-home audio cassettes would lead to rampant piracy, killing off legitimate record labels. The sky didn’t fall then, but the RIAA continues to challenge any technological and social change it regards as a threat to its hegemony. For the past couple of years it’s been bullying—with lawsuits—teenagers who dare to share music files on the Internet, a practice not much different from sharing cassette copies of favorite songs. Now the RIAA is yelping about the peril of downloading from high-quality digital radio:
With the digital radio marketplace experiencing a convergence across all platforms—a convergence creating arbitrary advantages for certain services over others at the expense of creators—the music community is making the case to Congress for balance and fair competition.Balance? Fair compeition? Now, there are a couple of novel ideas. Here’s another one: Why don’t the RIAA members focus on producing content that people would actually pay a fair price for? And distributing it in a way that’s attractive to consumers, not merely convenient for the luddite troglodytes monopolizing the recording industry?
As a member of one file-sharing portal has said, “5 corporations selling 95% of what people see, think and hear is not good for a democracy.”
