`Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news," sang Chuck Berry five decades ago in a glorious call to arms, heralding what he imagined would be the death of classical music and the dawn of a thousand years of rock 'n' roll. "I don't know much about it, but if it destroys record companies, then it's good," said Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie earlier this year when asked about downloading music from the Internet.
Berry's prediction, while an invigorating statement of youthful intent, proved somewhat wide of the mark - rock 'n' roll killed off the innocent bobby-soxers leaving classical music to thrive with Beethoven now shifting considerably more units than Berry.
Gillespie's ill-informed statement, meanwhile, indicates that his talents are best served making rock/dance hybrid music, and not prognosticating on the future of technology.
Acres of print in the last few months have been devoted to a long obituary for the music industry. We've all read that Napster, MP3 and Gnutella will soon replace EMI, BMG and Universal in our lexicon of music providers. We all have friends who've claimed: "I'm never buying another CD. It's downloads all the way for me".
Musicians will leave record companies in droves, we read, to sell their own music online. And who but an eejit would pay for a song you can get for free over the Internet? The best riposte to those who so eagerly welcome the supposed death of an industry that has provided us all with so much joy, is a quote from a US music company executive: "If things are so bad, how come we're selling so many records?" Quite.
In the first six months of this year there were over 350 million albums sold in the US alone. Shipments of CDs in the US will top a billion for the first time ever this year and the combined sale of CDs, DVDs and vinyl will be worth over $15 billion.
On the flip side, Napster has registered 13 million users worldwide in 18 months and MP3.com has 74,000 artists available for download. These are impressive figures - until you realise that more people bought the new Britney Spears album on the day it was released than have ever bought anything off MP3.com.
Napster likes to be portrayed as a music business renegade and the fact that former rebels such as Metallica and Dr Dre have sued it has only enhanced that reputation - and doomed those two bastions of metal and rap to an early middle-age. But what did Napster do when punk band The Offspring - one of the new technology's most ardent supporters - started selling Napster T-shirts through their own website? They sued them over copyright infringement of course. The band and Napster have now come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Tshirt dividends are split and The Offspring maintain that Napster has helped, not hindered, their record sales. The wisdom is that people get to try a song for free, if they like it they'll buy the CD.
And that is the crux of the argument. Sure, eight-track cartridges were replaced by the cassette tape and vinyl has, to a large extent, been replaced by CDs. However, in each case, the superceding technology has been something tangible, something you can hold, proudly show to others and read in the sleevenotes about who played that dynamite solo on track three. MP3 offers none of the above. It doesn't even offer a comparable sound quality.
Now, as you will read elsewhere, the quality and capacity of MP3 files and players are improving and in-car MP3 players are beginning their assault on the marketplace. Nevertheless, a few salient points are worth noting:
All this technology will be prohibitively expensive for the foreseeable future.
Hundreds of millions more people worldwide have CD players than Internet-ready computers. CDs have been around since the early 1980s, but it's only now that you see more CD than tape Walkmans.
Having just adapted to one new mobile technology, how likely are we to suddenly all move to personal-MP3 players?
The only successful sale of an album through download so far has been Public Enemy's There's a Poison Going On. They were a long-established and extremely successful band before deciding to make their current record available online prior to selling it as a CD. The whole point of their success in this field was that they wanted more control over their product and the profits that came from its sale. They were not some unknown band that suddenly became an Internet phenomenon by breaking all the rules. They still sent out promo CDs to radio stations and music journalists and they still took out ads in magazines. They still played the game.
There is no way that an unheard-of band could reach that level of success without the benefit of a record company budget to push them. The vast majority of track requests that go through the various free Net delivery systems are for bands that are already in the public eye and selling lots of albums. Sure, you can say that The Blair Witch Project was an Internet success story, but where did you see the movie? In the cinema. As BMG Entertainment's chief executive, Strauss Zelnick, said recently: "We invest billions of dollars every year worldwide to find people with talent, to bottle what they have and distribute it widely. That's not changing."
What is going to happen, what is already happening in fact, is that record companies are realising that there is a huge untapped promotional tool called the Internet out there. More and more of them are making MP3 files available in advance as a teaser for a forthcoming record. They are developing ways of selling albums as downloads, though that is as yet a tiny market.
Dean Ween, of the band Ween, was expressing the attitude of a lot of musicians to the new technology when he said: "I don't care what they do with our out-takes and our live stuff, but our records are what count to us. We put a lot of time and anxiety and love into our records." The message is, download the obscure stuff if you will, but buy the CDs too, otherwise the bands won't survive and there will be no more out-takes to get.
pcollins@irish-times.com