ARNOLD KLING says that Janis Ian is wrong — not in her criticisms of the music industry, but in placing her faith in CDs as a means of distribution:

I think that her solutions will not work, because the problem with the music industry is much deeper. I think that the problem is that CD’s are obsolete, and the music industry is trying to use the legal system to crush more efficient means for storing and distributing music. I believe that you cannot use a web site as a loss-leader for CD’s, because CD’s are an expensive storage medium compared to hard disks. You cannot charge 25 cents per download, because that would add up to overly expensive charges to the people who download most frequently.

I think that the solution will involve distributing massive quantities of music on hard disks, and allowing unlimited downloads for annual subscription fees. But this would radically change the role of the music industry, which it is not willing to accept.

He thinks the music industry will be bypassed in 5-10 years. My own experience cuts both ways on that front. My own record label, Wonderdog Records, sells CDs, but there’s no question that more of our music was distributed by download than by CD. Our stuff (was) all over Napster, AudioGalaxy, etc. I’d be willing to bet that online distribution exceeded meatspace distribution by a factor of 100.

This didn’t make us any money, of course (oh, it probably sold a few extra CDs, but it didn’t make us any identifiable money) but since we’re effectively a nonprofit operation that didn’t matter. In fact, we actively encouraged people to make our tunes available on filesharing systems, since we and our artists understand that the point is to make the music available, not to make money for it. (Our artist contracts begin “It is understood that Wonderdog Records is not a normal record company.”)

At the same time, though I get a lot of my music online, from independent artists who make it available for free, I still buy a lot of CDs. And I’m not thrilled with the idea of hard drives as the main residence of music: that kind of storage is too impermanent. I have CDs from almost 20 years ago. My mom has Louis Armstrong records from the 1920s, long before she was born. Who’s going to have MP3s of the Tumblin’ Sneakers song The Secret World of Charles Kuralt in 50 years? (Media junkies — you must listen to this song, which is a hoot).

Maybe I’m wrong about that, but when I really like music, I want hardcopy, not just hard-drive copy. Perhaps there will be a technological fix. In the meantime, CDs have actually gotten pretty damned cheap — until you factor in the markup needed to pay for record execs’ cocaine and fancy cars.

And the DIY, more-or-less nonprofit approach to music may be what kills big labels, one tiny bite at a time. When you look at the people willing to operate rock clubs on an effectively nonprofit basis, you have to wonder: as the population becomes richer, and has more leisure time, perhaps all sorts of activities will move from the for-profit to the not-really-for-profit sector.