The Times: Tech column - Janis Ian's battle/Hotspot boom/Dot-com hubris
By David Rowan
IN HER day, Janis Ian was the chart-topper with a conscience - the outspoken singer-songwriter whose hits Society's Child and At Seventeen spoke up for interracial love and lamented the despair of "ugly duckling" schoolgirls.
Now, three decades on, Janis Ian is back - and this time her target is the ugly music industry. In a single heroic diatribe against the record labels, she has injected more common sense into the digital-copyright debate than a thousand legal judgments could.
In May, Ian wrote a lucid article for the small-circulation Performing Songwriter Magazine in defence of free file-swapping networks. Rather than fight to ban music downloads, she argued, the record companies and the artists they represent should positively encourage them as a fantastic sampling opportunity that would entice spending customers in the long term. Coming from an influential insider - Ian has won nine Grammy nominations - the article was soon picked up by 1,000 websites and has drawn 2,200 e-mails to Ian's inbox in the past three weeks alone. "Quite frankly, I was not planning to become part of a 'cause'," she said this week. Yet this one piece has emerged as a devastating counter-blow to the huge lobbying power of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Her main contention is based on her own experience that satisfied visitors who download free tracks from her website (janisian.com) often return to buy a CD. She believes that, rather than spending $45 million last year lobbying to protect "the artists" against Napster and its successors, the RIAA should be rejoicing at the new technologies. "Here is a foolproof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise never buy a CD in a store," she points out. "The cross marketing opportunities are unbelievable."
Instead, the record companies - which, she believes, would also benefit from the networks' ability to showcase new talent - are trying to destroy the technology and punish the consumer. Their mindset remains set in the 1930s, when they last developed a successful business model. That explains their similar crusades against reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VHS and even MTV - which they eventually had to accept, just as file-swapping will surely defeat the legislators and lawyers.
Janis Ian wants the record companies to conduct an experiment in which the labels would jointly build a single giant website and, for a year, offer for downloading everything in their catalogues that is currently out of print. The download fee should be reasonable - say, 15p a song - and the test ought not to cost anyone money, as the tracks would not otherwise be on sale. If her thesis is correct, consumers would return to buy their favourite artists' CDs. Now, do any of the labels care to sign up?
++++
SLOWLY we are becoming a nation of "hotspots" - local wireless networks that allow internet use away from a phone line. Last week BT joined the so-called WiFi revolution, offering wireless net access in 20 locations from Heathrow airport to the Bluewater shopping centre. By next summer the company aims to have 400 hot spots, connected via the 2.4GHz radio frequency that has been linking local non-commercial networks. But unlike these, which tend to be available free of charge, BT's Openzone service charges up to £85 a month and hopes to make £30 million a year by 2005. That will not be easy if the free WiFi movement continues to grow. You need merely to key your postcode into www.consume.net to find your nearest node - and all without boosting BT's share price.
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Hubris from the dot-com era (an occasional series): Two years ago Naveen Jain, CEO of the "wireless and internet services" company InfoSpace, made this prediction: "There are two kinds of people in this world...those who don't believe in God, and those who believe in God and InfoSpace. That's OK - the non-believers will be converted when we become a trillion-dollar company." Then, InfoSpace shares were close to their $130 peak; this week they were below 40 cents, and Jain was "stepping down" from his post. God, where were you?
(The Times, August 7 2002)
IN HER day, Janis Ian was the chart-topper with a conscience - the outspoken singer-songwriter whose hits Society's Child and At Seventeen spoke up for interracial love and lamented the despair of "ugly duckling" schoolgirls.
Now, three decades on, Janis Ian is back - and this time her target is the ugly music industry. In a single heroic diatribe against the record labels, she has injected more common sense into the digital-copyright debate than a thousand legal judgments could.
In May, Ian wrote a lucid article for the small-circulation Performing Songwriter Magazine in defence of free file-swapping networks. Rather than fight to ban music downloads, she argued, the record companies and the artists they represent should positively encourage them as a fantastic sampling opportunity that would entice spending customers in the long term. Coming from an influential insider - Ian has won nine Grammy nominations - the article was soon picked up by 1,000 websites and has drawn 2,200 e-mails to Ian's inbox in the past three weeks alone. "Quite frankly, I was not planning to become part of a 'cause'," she said this week. Yet this one piece has emerged as a devastating counter-blow to the huge lobbying power of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Her main contention is based on her own experience that satisfied visitors who download free tracks from her website (janisian.com) often return to buy a CD. She believes that, rather than spending $45 million last year lobbying to protect "the artists" against Napster and its successors, the RIAA should be rejoicing at the new technologies. "Here is a foolproof way to deliver music to millions who might otherwise never buy a CD in a store," she points out. "The cross marketing opportunities are unbelievable."
Instead, the record companies - which, she believes, would also benefit from the networks' ability to showcase new talent - are trying to destroy the technology and punish the consumer. Their mindset remains set in the 1930s, when they last developed a successful business model. That explains their similar crusades against reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VHS and even MTV - which they eventually had to accept, just as file-swapping will surely defeat the legislators and lawyers.
Janis Ian wants the record companies to conduct an experiment in which the labels would jointly build a single giant website and, for a year, offer for downloading everything in their catalogues that is currently out of print. The download fee should be reasonable - say, 15p a song - and the test ought not to cost anyone money, as the tracks would not otherwise be on sale. If her thesis is correct, consumers would return to buy their favourite artists' CDs. Now, do any of the labels care to sign up?
++++
SLOWLY we are becoming a nation of "hotspots" - local wireless networks that allow internet use away from a phone line. Last week BT joined the so-called WiFi revolution, offering wireless net access in 20 locations from Heathrow airport to the Bluewater shopping centre. By next summer the company aims to have 400 hot spots, connected via the 2.4GHz radio frequency that has been linking local non-commercial networks. But unlike these, which tend to be available free of charge, BT's Openzone service charges up to £85 a month and hopes to make £30 million a year by 2005. That will not be easy if the free WiFi movement continues to grow. You need merely to key your postcode into www.consume.net to find your nearest node - and all without boosting BT's share price.
++++
Hubris from the dot-com era (an occasional series): Two years ago Naveen Jain, CEO of the "wireless and internet services" company InfoSpace, made this prediction: "There are two kinds of people in this world...those who don't believe in God, and those who believe in God and InfoSpace. That's OK - the non-believers will be converted when we become a trillion-dollar company." Then, InfoSpace shares were close to their $130 peak; this week they were below 40 cents, and Jain was "stepping down" from his post. God, where were you?
(The Times, August 7 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, August 07, 2002
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