Cash for Notes

iTunes is selling music in India at very affordable prices. But can the Indian listener be persuaded to pay?

When a favourite band of mine streamed the lead single from its forthcoming album, I scoured the internet for a download of any sort, safe in the sanctimonious knowledge that I would buy the album when it came out. A Google search led me to Apple Computer’s Indian iTunes store where the song was available for Rs 15. I was convinced there was a mistake, but I signed in and downloaded the song.

I tested the selection available by searching for a few stock obscure albums, much like my father taught me to test a new dictionary by checking for words like ‘anent’. What surprised me more than the impressive selection of albums, many of which are either out of print or practically impossible to acquire, was that every single album I searched for cost no more than Rs 120. These are the same albums that are priced $8-15 at the American iTunes store. The difference is startling to say the least.

iTunes arrived in India quietly last December with a revolutionary aim: to change how music lovers acquire their music—specifically music that is created and copyrighted outside India, since distribution channels for Indian music are often quite different and rather complex. With this development, music distribution in India is poised to change.

Illegal downloading of music from outside India is so much a part of our culture that the idea of paying for it is seen as exceptional. When the Swedish rock band Pain of Salvation headlined IIT-M’s Saarang Festival in 2011, a large portion of the 7,000-plus crowd sang along with most songs, despite the fact that until then it was impossible to buy the band’s albums in India unless they were specially ordered from elsewhere. Drummer Leo Margarit told me that the situation is similar in South America, where the band regularly plays to passionate fans whose numbers are far larger than Pain of Salvation’s total album sales in the region.

Digital media—and music in particular—is at the forefront of the debate on intellectual property because it was the first commodity (to put it crudely) of which exact copies could be made without the expense of further resources or the original being diminished.

Psychoacoustic theories allowed for the compression of music files with a loss in quality that most human ears could not sense. This made it possible for songs to be distributed over the internet even when speeds were nowhere as high as they are today. And this is how musicians, not filmmakers or artists, became unwitting guinea pigs.

The iTunes experiment is in a position to reveal something deep about urban India’s attitude towards music from overseas. Initial signs are far from promising, especially in light of the closure of Flipkart’s Flyte service, which cited music piracy as the primary cause of its demise.

Unlike services like Nokia Music and Sony Music’s Jive service, iTunes does not require any special purchases or subscription. It runs on virtually any computer, and at worst, you will have to convert music from Apple’s proprietary m4a format to the mp3 format, something that can be done within iTunes itself. It is simple and requires no commitment.

For years, the pro-illegal-download lobby has relied on the argument that limited availability of legal sources of music necessitates less ethical alternatives. Music retailers in India made available only the most popular rock and pop bands’ albums. In order to listen to anything more obscure than Michael Jackson or Sting, one had no choice but to find alternatives in the back-alleys of the internet.

As more albums became available in the form of imports, there was an issue of pricing. A tag of Rs 1,000 was deemed exorbitant for a CD, so scruples be damned, it was back to the back-alleys. As a result, these and many other albums disappeared off store shelves with depressing efficiency.

Whether the real issue was the price itself or the notion that music should be paid for at all is a question that will certainly be addressed by the iTunes experiment. In India, it has the advantage of a vast existing library that it can tap and on which it can offer huge discounts, unlike Flyte, which effectively had to start from scratch.

The ubiquity of free copyright-protected music has also led to attempts at justifying these illegal downloads on ethical grounds. While it is often unfair to attack a stance based on its most extreme adherents, I must briefly bring up the ‘Free Music Philosophy’—as compiled by Ram Samudrala of University of Washington in Seattle, USA, a long-time proponent of the free distribution of copyrighted music—simply because it presents a systematic collection of many of the ideas that masquerade as arguments against intellectual property rights.

Samudrala puts forth several reasons why freeing music of copyright is ‘ethically the right thing to do’:

‘Limiting your creativity to specific audiences, especially based on monetary reasons, is shirking existential responsibility and destructive to society as a whole.’ This is an argument that has been presented in various forms before. If all creative endeavours are achieved as a result of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, then, according to Samudrala, no one has the right to derive any remuneration from one’s own contributions—a patently absurd suggestion. By extension, no human endeavour is deserving of any form of monetary compensation.

He continues: ‘in order to prevent “illegal” copies from being made, a tremendous burden… must be placed on all individuals to circumvent human nature.’ This implies that laws of any description should be abolished, since they are all in place to circumvent some aspect of human nature.

Samudrala goes on, with no compunction, to say, ‘the greatest reward musicians should have is their own music and nothing else.’ It is extremely easy for a tenured academic to extol the virtues of art for art’s sake at the expense of income. Some musicians may decide to forgo monetary rewards in favour of artistic fulfilment, though the two are in no sense mutually exclusive. No one, however, has the right to demand that this be the case for all musicians. The reality is that many artistes make the best of a deteriorating situation by making their music available free so that it is heard, hoping that the exposure will eventually result in people paying for their music. This does not amount to a tacit approval of this state of affairs.

In a paper published in Journal of Business Ethics, entitled ‘Ethical Issues in the Music Industry Response to Innovation and Piracy’, Robert Easley draws attention to the perception that circumventing copyright laws is a form of civil disobedience ‘designed to protest the excessive scope of copyright protections, and attendant limits on distribution and price gouging’.

Once again, this is absurd. Music is a luxury, not a fundamental right. Downloading music illegally is not civil disobedience, it is theft. No amount of verbal calisthenics will change that fact.

A debate is already raging, most recently reignited by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, anent the company Spotify’s subscription-based model. Spotify offers a subscriber unlimited access to its database of millions of songs for a monthly fee of around $10. Artistes receive royalties on their songs based on the number of times they are played, according to an algorithm that is obscure and far from generous.

The Spotify debate, however, is one that will only become relevant to India if the iTunes experiment succeeds. With prices as low as they are at this online store, a similar debate on the compensation received by musicians is likely. If iTunes can demonstrate that given the opportunity, Indian consumers will pay for music, it will pave the way for India to be seen globally as a legitimate market—bringing with it, among other things, the advantages of having a voice in such a debate.

If not, then the message is either that musicians are not considered worthy of remuneration or, more likely, that most people are just indifferent to the problem of piracy.

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