Flow

By Crispin Sartwell

There was a time when no one owned music. Anyone who could sing or play an instrument could play anything she liked, and since there were no means of mechanical reproduction of sound, specific performances could not be sold after they were complete.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, musical performances became commodities that could be mass-produced and purchased. Companies sprang up to manufacture these commodities, and musicians began to derive income from recordings.

Right now, we are seeing a transformation of the music business that is comparable to the introduction of recording. One node of this transformation is Napster, a program that encourages the free flow of music files over the internet.

The objections of musicians and record companies to Napster are serious. If music can be reproduced free and more or less instantaneously, then no one will buy cds and tapes. And if no one buys cds and tapes, then artists and companies make no money. If they make no money, they won't make the music in the first place. So potentially Napster can kill the music industry.

But opposing the free flow of music over the internet now is likely to be as futile as opposing sound recording in 1920. The question is not going to be whether music should flow freely over the internet. It's going to be how we deal with the fact that it does.

In the digital world, all things are one thing. Text, image, sound, buying, selling, communication, art, sex, enlightenment: all of it is digital information. And information is essentially liquid. It escapes through every crack.

Napster is a crack. Information flows out through it and becomes something that no one owns. It demonstrates that information is a hard place to stake a claim. Owning information is like owning a certain piece of the ocean or the sky: there's really no telling where the water or air is going. Information is a current or a wind.

The most significant question for the new economy is whether information can be controlled. Certainly Microsoft, AOL/Time-Warner and others think it can be, and are staking their future cashflow on that belief.

But information has a tendency to flow free of ownership. If I do a web search on myself, I find things I've written in the darnedest places. How, realistically, could I keep that from happening once what I've written appears on the web? That is a question that dogs all "content providers." I read newspapers and magazines for free these days, and am simply irritated when someone wants my credit card number. Most anyone with a little patience can scan a book into the net and e-mail to his friends.

The very concept of ownership is going to have to be re-thought, because information is not like a piece of land that you can mark off, occupy, and possess. Metallica's song "I Disappear," over which they are suing Napster, exists nowhere and potentially everywhere. It exists wherever the properly-encoded cd exists, or wherever someone is downloading it or swapping it.

There are various technologies that seek to stanch the flow of information: we've seen that with regard to commercially pre-recorded video cassettes, for instance, which are designed to be unreproducible. And it may be that a variety of devices can be made that could not reproduce certain kinds of information, or that could not reproduce information from certain sources. You can change the hardware.

But I don't think you can alter the information itself so that it can't be reproduced. Any innovations that could do that (various forms of encryption, for example) would themselves consist of information and so they could, in principle, be reproduced.

What I'm saying is that I don't think that ultimately the people who generate digital information are going to be able to control it. That fact will transform the economy and our everyday lives. It may be that music will again be free as the air. That wouldn't be the end of the world.

We don't now know how the transformation of art into information will affect musicians and other folks who make a living from music. But whether the future for musicians is free and beautiful or poverty-stricken and exploitative is not up to us, or even up to the record companies. The information is flowing, and the future belongs not to folks who try to stop that flow, but to people who try to use it creatively