[Nettime-bold] The Grammys' Potemkin Download

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print



March 7, 2002

THE POP LIFE


Downloading Files and Storms


By NEIL STRAUSS


Every year Michael Greene, the president of the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences, stands onstage during the show he runs, the
Grammy Awards, and delivers a speech about an issue that pertains to the
music world. On the broadcast last week, however, he chose a strange way to
make his point.

The issue he addressed was the unauthorized trading of songs on the
Internet. During the awards show he showed clips of what he said were three
students downloading "as many music files as possible from easily
accessible Web sites." He added that in two days the three students
downloaded nearly 6,000 songs.

"Now multiply that by millions of students and other computer users, and
the problem comes into sharp focus," he said. As he made his point, the
cameras zeroed in on the three students, all looking very sheepish.

His speech, as anticipated, ignited much discussion and controversy among
music fans and those in the industry. But in addition, it seems strange
that he would admit on national television that he hired three people to
break the law (the Electronic Theft Act) and then show them in the process
of doing this, especially since one is a minor.

And now one of these downloaders for hire (at about $12 an hour), Numair
Faraz, has stepped forward to say that Mr. Greene's claim that three
students downloaded 6,000 files from easily accessible Web sites isn't even
true. For starters, Mr. Faraz, 17, isn't a student: he left school to start
his own technology business. But more to the point, he says that the group
didn't spend two days downloading music; they spent three. And most
revealing, he says that most of the music wasn't even downloaded from
publicly accessible Web sites.

Speaking about Mr. Greene, Mr. Faraz said, "He said it took two days to do
all the stuff, and we did it for three days from 9 to 6 and left the
computers on all night long, except we'd come back and the computers would
be frozen."

"I was the only one who used Bearshare and Kazaa extensively," he
continued, referring to two popular file-exchanging programs. "And half of
my files never completed: they were halfway downloaded or not downloaded at
all."

As for the two others, both students at the University of California at Los
Angeles, he said they hardly even used file-sharing sites. Instead, he
said, they used AOL Instant Messenger, a chat program, to receive songs,
which friends sent them from their hard drives. This not only means that
the songs weren't on public Web sites, but also that there is no guarantee
that they were ever illegally downloaded, since some could have been from
CD's purchased by students and ripped into their hard drives.

Mr. Faraz estimated that 4,000 of the songs were sent as private messages
using Instant Messenger, and a few songs were legitimate authorized
downloads from the Web site MP3.com.

Barb Dehgan, a spokeswoman for the recording academy, said, "The kids were
asked to download as many songs as possible off the World Wide Web,
specifically, publicly accessible Web sites." She added that they worked
two half-days and one full day. She did not comment about the legality of
the project.

While some in the music business applauded Mr. Greene's speech, others
criticized it and wondered what point he was trying to make.

"Burning, ripping and sharing is not killing music," Ken Waagner, a
digital-media consultant in Chicago who was part of the recording academy's
board of governors for four years, wrote in a letter to Mr. Greene. "Greed,
stupidity and ignorance on the part of the policy wonks and further
alienating the listener is the real threat to the business, and ultimately
the artist's ability to be heard."

So why, then, when Mr. Faraz knew that the whole project was ridiculous did
he go along with it? "I got free hotel in the Biltmore," he said. "That's
one reason to stick with it."

Unzipped

Audiogalaxy, a free music-sharing software and Internet site where MP3
files of songs are exchanged, was once the center of a small subculture of
music fans who traded zip files of entire albums as well. These files
packaged every song on a CD, plus images from the artwork, into a single
convenient, easy-to-download file. Because Audiogalaxy was created only for
the transfer of MP3 songs, these elaborate zip files were disguised by
users to look like MP3 files to computers.

But after this column on Feb. 25 detailed this practice, Audiogalaxy
disabled the word "zip" from its search engine. Where previously searching
for files with the word zip in them turned up thousands of full albums, now
the search turns up nothing, not even song titles with the actual word zip
in them.

What happened? Michael Merhej, a spokesman for Audiogalaxy, said that there
was such a large amount of traffic on the site and so many different things
happening in the company that executives had been unaware of zip trading.
Once company employees tried it for themselves, "we did block the word
zip," he said.

"The purpose of Audiogalaxy is not to download complete albums that you can
go buy," he added. "The system is not made to handle this, but people
contrive things to make it work."

Though the word zip is now blocked in the Audiogalaxy search engine, those
zip files of entire albums still exist. One just has to find a different
word to use to search for them or try the Usenet, where a whole news group
is dedicated to full album downloads.
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Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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