How Universal Rescued Music from Its Fans
Once upon a time, in an unnamed country, people were doing terrible things with music. They shared it with each other. They posted music videos online. They transcribed lyrics and put them on their websites, free of charge, without asking permission from anyone. The poor musicians had no choice but to seek shelter with the great defender of justice: Universal Music.
Armed with briefcases full of money and an army of soulless lawyers, Universal rode out against file-sharing networks, music forums, and lyrics sites, knocking them down one by one. But why stop when it was all going so well? There was still so much injustice in the world. So they crept around a nearby bush, peered over the top, and spotted the new enemy: teenagers on YouTube and MySpace, laughing and dancing and letting their favorite songs play in the background of fan videos, uploading music clips without written permission, cheerfully promoting their idols in the most harmless way imaginable.
Universal and its allies couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Fans—actual customers—were casually recommending music to each other, letting people hear songs they couldn’t download anywhere, using official music videos as free advertising for the very labels that owned them. Unknown bands were getting discovered this way. This had to stop immediately. Sue everything.
Never mind that it meant more exposure for the artists. Universal still remembered how MTV had built a billion-dollar empire by airing their videos for free, and how Universal itself grew fat on that arrangement for two decades. The greedy bastards chose to forget all of it the moment they smelled a winnable lawsuit. The same model that made them rich was now the enemy, apparently, because the internet was running it instead of a cable channel they’d already figured out how to exploit.
And so the fairy tale ends the only way it could. Universal bans everything and everyone from playing their music more than two meters away—soundproofed walls will have to do. On the internet, only five-second MIDI previews remain, for promotional purposes, at the label’s discretion. They’re thick as thieves with Viacom now, since MTV completed its own transformation from music channel to money machine years ago. Digital storefronts are dead—nobody could wrap their heads around the label’s pricing of €9.99 per single track, so Universal walked away from every negotiation and straight into court. The lawsuits continue. Anyone caught humming their favorite song on the street gets served with papers by morning.
Can Universal actually do all of this? Of course they can. They invented music, after all.