December 20, 2004

Fighting a Downhill Battle

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Universal Music Group struck a deal with Snocap (run by founder of Napster) that would allow Universal to recognize songs swapped on the network and send the users a bill. Sony-BMG is discussing a similar deal with Grokster.

MJ.com: Why do you think the former founder of Napster (and former thorn in the side of record companies) has chosen to become the intermediary between P2P and record companies?

HW: My sense is that he wants money and his name is the primary thing he has to sell. The interesting question isn’t why he chose to work with them, it’s why they chose to work with him. And that comes down to name recognition too, I think. They want to buy the phenomenon, so they buy its former figurehead.

MJ.com: What is the future of Peer-to-peer technology in this kind of environment?

HW: We don’t think this has any real bearing on the future of filesharing. Essentially it’s just a service where you can download songs online and pay a huge bill at the end of the month, and most of the money won’t get to the musicians. That’s nothing new–iTunes is the same thing, and we’d be shocked if they make as slick a service as iTunes.

MJ.com: What would you say to anyone who is thinking about joining a P2P organization that requires payment?

HW: The same thing we say to anyone buying music anywhere, whether it’s from a p2p network, an online store like iTunes, or a record store: When you spend money on music, look into where your money’s going. If it’s on one of the “Big Four” corporate record labels, almost none (if any) of your money makes it to the musician. And on the whole that purchase hurts musicians, by propping up a corrupt system. If it’s on an independent label, your money’s likely to go to the right place, and you won’t be supporting monopolists.


Links:

Find out if the CD labels you buy pay radio stations to play their music at Magnetbox.com

Lessig’s site, creativecommons.org shows how to obtain progressive licenses for artists, writers, and musicians on the web.

Find out
how you can avoid getting sued by RIAA, or if your name has been subpoenaed from your ISP

Through Downhill Battle you can:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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