When I was a kid, I got a double cassette deck for one of my birthdays. With it I could copy my friends’ cassettes without having to buy my own. This was the era of the mix tape: When the only way you would get exposed to music that wasn’t played on the radio was when a friend got a copy of a friend’s mix tape. That’s how I, a white kid in Oslo, Norway, was introduced to 2 Live Crew and their less-than-PC antics and how I learned to love Faith No More and Nine Inch Nails at the age of 13. Back then, bands like Metallica who were living on the fringes of the mainstream were reliant on widespread copying to get their music heard. Today things are very different. Just how different is maybe best illustrated by the fact that Metallica is at the very forefront of the battle against online pirating (more commonly known as “downloading mp3s”). And if you copy your own music onto your mp3 player the record labels consider you a common thief.

The problem stems from the invention of the mp3 file format and the introduction of peer-to-peer sharing networks in the 1990s. All of a sudden the mix-tape evolved and anyone with a modem could access music from all over the world free of charge. Just how explosive this trend was struck me in 1999 when I accessed a server at my university and found over 200,000 full albums. The technology was so new and spread so quickly that no one knew quite what to make of it. Sure there were questions of legality, but the sheer joy of having an immense music library at your fingertips quickly overshadowed any moral concerns. But the bliss was short lived.

Only a couple of years after its arrival, the grandfather of all peer-to-peer music sharing networks, Napster, went offline – the victim of endless lawsuits of copyright infringement. And the many alternatives that had popped up in the meantime were quickly overflowing with spyware, porn and corrupt files. But parallel to this development a small piece of white plastic and electronics was on the verge of revolutionizing the way we all listened to music. In 2001, Apple released the iPod – a digital music player that did away with tapes and discs forever. And with its introduction the recording industry faced an impossible situation: With a music player that didn’t need discs, tapes or any other physical media, why would consumers buy their products?

To solve this problem, the major labels introduced widespread copy protection. Unfortunately the copy protection was both ineffective and destructive. While the online community had no problem bypassing the poor attempts at preventing illegal reproduction of the music, many consumers found that their newly purchased discs either didn’t play or in some cases even destroyed their players. There was also another problem: If people bought an album and wanted to put it on their iPod, wouldn’t copy protection prevent them from using the product they had just purchased? This conundrum saw the introduction of another ill-advised idea: Digital Rights Management (DRM). The thought was that a file that cannot be copied cannot be shared. This technology was heavily utilized by iTunes and some other online music stores. But DRM causes its own set of problems, most importantly that it is often tied to the device used. Take the iPod and iTunes as an example: Songs purchased through iTunes can only be played on an iPod or with iTunes. So if you own an iPod and it breaks, you have to buy a new iPod to be able to listen to your music. This is an ingenious way of keeping a loyal customer base but it is also fundamentally wrong because you are creating a monopoly.

In the end, all the attempts at stopping pirating through copy protection, DRM and other means only served to damage the music labels themselves. And when the labels suffer, the artists and the music suffer more. Although the labels blame pirating for the steadily declining record sales of the last 10 years, many will agree with me when I say it is the consolidation of power and the misguided attempts at controlling creative content that is the main culprit.

It all ties back to the mix-tape and how we are introduced to new music. With the introduction of mp3s and Napster, a musical universe previously occupied by underground cliques and audiophiles became public domain and the world was introduced to songs and artists they had never heard of before. And in many cases this new exposure led to increased sales. I can only speak for myself but a large portion of my record collection was acquired after finding new and exiting artists on Napster. But with this unfiltered dispersal of music comes a loss of control by the powers that be. Whereas before the labels and distribution channels such as Clear Channel were pretty much in charge of what people heard, file sharing meant that the power all of a sudden was in the hands of the consumers. And that in turn meant that the massive investments done in promotion for artists the labels felt were the next big thing weren’t necessarily going to pay off. Why? Because if there was a better alternative out there, people were likely to find it. As a friend of mine said: “The only people who should be worried about file sharing are the bands that make bad music.”

To regain control, the major labels started a campaign of unprecedented consolidation of power. In the late -90s and early 2000s, what used to be thousands of labels became just four: Warner Music, Sony / BMG, EMI and Universal. It is these labels, through their organization the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), that have been waging war on the consumers for the last few years. And on Thursday October 4th, they won a major case against pirates in a court in Minnesota, inadvertently putting the future of their own industry at risk. In the case, the jury found Jammie Thomas guilty of copyright infringement for sharing digital music files on the internet. Thomas was instructed to pay $9,250 for each of 24 shared songs totaling $222,000 in penalties. This sets a dangerous precedent for consumers because the recording industry has some very strange ideas about exactly what constitutes “stealing” a song: Jennifer Pariser, head of litigation for Sony BMG, testified in the case that “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy.’ ” In other words, if you buy an album and put the tracks on your mp3 player, you are a thief! And if you thought that was bad, just wait. On October 8th, the UK based Performing Rights Society (PRS) took a car repair chain called Kwik-Fit to court for copyright infringement. The PRS claim is that the playing of loud music during work hours constitutes a public performance that requires a permit. They are asking that the car repair chain pay £200,000 in licensing fees for 250 such “performances”.

Fortunately it’s not just the consumers that are fed up with this nonsense. Just one day after the ruling against Jammie Thomas, Yahoo! Music Vice President and GM, Ian Rogers, told a room full of music label execs at the Digital Media Forum in LA that unless the labels stop slapping DRM on their files, Yahoo! will not invest any more time or money in distributing their music: “I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.” And he’s not the only one. On October 10th, Radiohead released their new album In Rainbows online. What was revolutionary about the release was that unlike other online music stores, the band let the customers decide what they want to pay for the music – even if that means they pay nothing. It is reported that both Oasis and Jamiraquai are entertaining the idea of doing the same for their upcoming releases. A couple of days before Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor left a somewhat enigmatic message on his blog stating “as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.”

The question is: Where do we go from here? It seems the recording industry is hell bent on beating down what they consider pirating and regain the power they so senselessly squandered over the last decade. At the same time both governments, consumers, artists and even distributors like Yahoo! and Apple are revolting against their efforts and breaking out on their own. To me, it seems that unless the big four get their heads out of the sand and start looking at the reality they’ve created, they are in for a rude awakening when their milking cows jump ship, like Radiohead, or do like Madonna and dump their label to join the competition.