Meltdown in Minnesota

You've got to hand it to the record companies. Their PR departments must be run by mentally challenged chimpanzees. Witness the latest blow for freedom in beautiful downtown Duluth, where the corporate giants singled out poor Native American Jammie Thomas and whacked her with a $220,000 judgement for file sharing of songs off the Internet. After all, she makes $36,000 a year and also supports two boys on her own, so the labels probably figured she'd be able to pay it off in no time. What WERE they thinking- or, better yet, WERE they thinking?

According to the news reports, this worked out to $9,250 per song for 24 songs, probably all by Metallica (You remember when they whined about the Web a few years back). I'd love to know where this $10,000 figure came from - certainly not royalties, or the industry is making a lot more money than they claim they are. Strangely, not a single member of the recording industry has spoken out to even explain how this bizarre turn of events illustrates the problem.


No question, as I say in my Intro to Mass Media classes, that the Web has altered the media landscape into a brave new world. Anyone can be a reporter, a novelist, an artist, a - as they say - content provider because the technology is available to everybody. It's just that simple. Yet there are a couple of relevant observations that might help frame the debate.


First of all, how many years have the major labels extracted as much profit as possible from the hapless consumer, not to mention the absurd ticket prices for even a marginal tour? If the best the recording industry can do is "cookie cutter" pop stars - Debbie Gibson leads to Britney Spears to Hilary Duff to the next teen aged pop queen - then how can they expect loyalty or sympathy? Talent seems to have disappeared , swallowed up by marketing and promotion. Our so-called pop stars are interchangeable.


Secondly, what about exposure? What if Jammie and the millions of others who do likewise downloaded new up and coming artists? This is the double-edged sword of exposure - if you don't have it, you'll do anything to get it, but, once you get it, you'll do anything to protect it.


Finally, how about the millions of talented musicians out there who are totally passed over, ignored by the juggernaut? What are they supposed to, wait for some miracle to drop out of the sky, the dude chomping on the cigar who rolls up in a Cadillac with a contract ? For them, Web exposure is a make or break situation.


Unfortunately, I'm better at defining the problem then I am arriving at a solution. In some countries, you pay an annual fee to the government to use your radio or television. Although it seems onerous at first, this approach in fact gives the media greater independence by cutting the slavish desire to please the almighty advertiser. The fees can be split up among the artists ( This really is the model for satellite radio - paying a fee to get the product you want). Maybe the labels should somehow code their CDS so they can't be played on a computer. Maybe they should just resign themselves to smaller profits .


What they should NOT do is lash out indiscriminately at single mothers to make themselves look nastier than they already do. Maybe the government should get involved, have some kind of major conference to flesh out the issues instead of this ongoing guerrilla warfare approach. After all, in the final analysis, we don't need them - they need US.