The Message 3

Ever since the Internet entered the public consciousness, there have been debates about copyright and piracy, particularly where music's concerned. The big casualty in this war has been Napster, the website where you can download songs as computer files for free, or could do until Metallica took the creator to the Supreme Court.

The big problem for the people who try and stop this illegal practice is that however fast you close one website down, others spring up in its place. It's like a hydra - remove the head and two more grow back, and the possibility of stopping it is virtually non-existent. But at the end of the day, the debate all comes down to money, with musicians up in arms because free trade of their music means that people don't buy their records and they don't receive the royalties.

However, the industry heads that accuse web heads of criminality don't consider the true purpose of sites like Napster. People don't use the Internet to download whole albums, but particular songs. How many albums have been sold on the basis of a single hit and then turned out to be complete rubbish? (Babylon Zoo's The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes, anyone? )Legally, this means the people doing it are still breaking copyright law, though.

The true purpose of these music download sites is, I think, for bootlegs, B-sides and rarities that they can't get hold of or are way too expensive to get any other way. Take The Beatles for example. On one website I found, there were over fifteen thousand songs by The Beatles available for download, mostly live stuff and studio outtakes. If you're a massive fan, the lure of hearing something rare is sometimes too much of a temptation.

In the late seventies and early eighties, there was the same debate about home taping using blank cassette tapes, claiming they would kill the music industry. Check out your local HMV or Virgin and assess for yourself how laughable this claim was. However, the argument goes that because these downloads are digital in nature, however many times you copy onto a CD, it does not diminish in quality, unlike cassette tapes. But the industry has missed another obvious point. The people who use download sites cannot generally afford CD writers for their PC's, and the likelihood of them becoming bootleg barons of the future is laughably slim. Also, the time taken to download a track can vary greatly depending on the software you have, and Internet time does not come cheap in Britain. I imagine it's more of a problem in the US, where local calls to the web are free.

But ultimately, the music industry is safe, because people always like the feeling of holding a record in their hands; the knowledge that they own a particular single or album. I know from experience - my collection is full of singles and rarities that I've paid extortionate prices for but just had to have. If record companies focused their time more on bringing their huge prices down and less on trying to persecute the rabid fan, then they'd realise that they can use the Internet as a bonus and not as a hotbed of illicit exchange and a place to lose money.

Chris Stanley