Starving the Goose

OK, in the original "goose that laid the golden eggs" fable, the owner stupidly eviscerated the goose attempting to discover where the gold was coming from. Suppose, instead, the owner had refused to feed the goose, because most of the eggs were "too small."

Welcome to the latest chapter of the peer-to-peer saga, in which notable performers like Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day refuse to allow single-song downloads, and insist that only whole albums will be offered via pay-for-play services like iTunes. Here's the best part, these groups are, throgh management, hoisting an "artistic integrity" flag in defense of their refusal.

A representative of Q Prime management explains it this way:

"If you download a single, you may ignore the other tracks on the album. When our artists record a body of work, it's what they deem to be representative of their careers at that time."

So, if I understand this properly, the Red Hot Chili Peppers regard each of their albums as an integrated, indivisible whole, and the very notion that someone might, against their wishes, listen to a single song stripped from its richly structured artistic context so distresses the band that they see no choice but to remove their music from these services.

I assume these bands will also soon insist that MTV no longer air single videos, waiting instead for completed "video albums" with similarly integrated, indivisible artistic statements. And that "What Hits!?" album that stripped individual songs from their original albums and presented them decontextualized, divorced from their participation in those integrated, indivisible artistic statements? Well, that must have been a terrible oversight.

These four bands have relinquished the right to ever market another record with a sticker reading "featuring the hit . . ." More to the point, they represent the latest wave of record-industry-based refusal to simply give consumer what they clearly desire: the ability to purchase single songs at reasonable prices. This doesn't excuse illicit downloading, but it absolutely explains it.

Let's observe that the 5 million downloads via iTunes represent a tiny fraction of the potential market. Apple's computers constitute under 5% of the total market. The iTunes Music Store currently only reaches Mac users with System X, so we're really talking about 1-2% of comp0uter users. And the iTunes catalog is relatively small, featuring only parts of the five major labels' offerings minus Green Day, Metallica, et al. Imagine a truly comprehensive service with iTunes' ease-of-use and reasonable pricing offered to the other 98% of computer users. Even selling songs one-by-one, the numbers add up to real money pretty quickly. So, record companies . . . Chili Peppers . . . are you going to feed the goose?