PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 1540-7993/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE SECURITY & PRIVACY 73
For the past few years, the recorded music industry has blamed the “falloff” in CD sales on piracy, and they have lobbied heavily against technologies like file-sharing and CD writers.
Now, I am against piracy and in favor of artists being paid for their work, but before we start adding special-purpose restrictive hardware to everyone’s computer, let’s recognize that this is an old story. Music sales have declined in the past, and the recording industry has repeatedly blamed new technologies. But the new technologies haven’t gone away; the solution has always been some kind of economic bargain, and we should again expect an economic bargain to deal with the problems caused by online music distribution.
Recorded music sales: A brief history
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, using wax cylinders as the storage medium. Emil Berliner invented the disk in 1888, and the two formats fought it out for approximately 20 years until disks won out in the market. For the next 50 years, most music sales were of phonograph records (although there were still some player-piano rolls at the beginning). The history is not one of steady gains for music sales, but rather of ups and downs. New recording formats (tapes, CDs, and
such) often produce gains, but when alternative forms of home entertainment are introduced declines in recorded-music sales often follow.
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Michael Lesk is a professor in the School of Communication, Information, and Library Science at Rutgers University.
His research interests include digital libraries, networking, and Unix software. Lesk is author of Practical Digital Libraries (Morgan Kaufman, 1997). He received a PhD from Harvard in chemical physics.
He is a fellow of the ACM and a member of the IEEE and the American Society for
Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Contact him at lesk@acm.org.
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