The music industry was one of the first to feel the impact of the internet.
In 1996 ABC produced a short, funky TV series about internet culture. It was called “Http://” – after the characters used at the beginning of web page addresses. (These tell your browser that it can read the page using what is known as “Hypertext Transfer Protocol”).
Back then, more people had access to a VHS video recorder than to the internet, so the program encouraged viewers to record the show in order to play back additional text information that had been embedded within video frames at various points in the story.
This episode, entitled Global Groove, was about musicians from around the world using the internet to connect and form “virtual” bands, playing together and sharing ideas to create something new.
What makes the story so interesting is that, even in those pre-MP3 days of slow dial-up modems, musicians were grappling with the dilemmas of how to balance the creative freedom of digital sharing with the economic need to be paid for their music. If all of the wares in the digital bazaar are free how are the traders in ideas to earn their daily bread?
It was an exciting time. As reporter/musician Tom Morton put it. “If you think of the net as a new continent, the first colonists are arriving now. Some are Cyber-Utopians who want to keep the land free for common use – and others are Cyber-Entrepreneurs who want to fence it off”.
The musicians were also yearning for new ways to distribute their music directly and bypass the record companies, who they saw as an obstacle between them and their audiences.
2015 Update
The Res Rocket Surfer project used in the story ceased to operate in March 2003, but much of what the musicians striving to achieve has came to be.
Shortly after this video was made, the digital MP3 format came into widespread use. This allowed high quality music files to be distributed online, and led to the end of the golden era of the Compact Disk.
New technologies such as You Tube soon enabled musicians to bypass record companies to directly reach new audiences, and products such as iTunes opened up completely new ways to sell music to the public.
Even so, the question of how musicians make a living from their recorded music still remains open, with even major artists such as Taylor Swift complaining about how little return they receive from modern digital music streaming services.
(c) Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Http://abc.net.au/science
