“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. The hallucinated man perceives reality as a moving target.” William S. Burroughs

Dear readers,
What's interesting is that we may be living through, without realizing it, a new cultural tipping point as significant as Napster was, in its day, for music distribution.

I'm fairly comfortable talking about that period because I lived it at the source, in the early nineties, and as you know I did a great deal of work in MP3, since I ran the blog that became a cult favorite, Génération MP3, which some of you used when you got your first portable player.

MP3: when distribution was turned upside down

But let's go back for a moment to the MP3 battle. What's interesting is that MP3 essentially sandwiched producers and distributors.

Back then, Internet innovation always came down to driving the price of distribution to its marginal cost.

That's what MP3 did, through two breaks with the past:

1. Self-service digitization of CDs

By letting the average consumer rip their own CDs into MP3s.

The quality, at first, was fairly poor, until an encoder, LAME, started putting excellent-quality MP3s into circulation on P2P servers (by the standards of the time, at least).

2. Decentralized music distribution

MP3s then spread through several successive channels:

• First through forums

• Then through hybrid pirate sites (warez)

• Finally through peer-to-peer services (Napster, KaZaA, LimeWire)

• But also, and above all, through SoulSeek, a service in a category of its own, specializing in the distribution of rare music

You can't really say MP3 took the record industry by surprise, since the first experiments date from 1997 and the peak came in the early 2000s, notably with the rise of Napster and KaZaA.

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A world in chaotic transition

In reality, producers and distributors found themselves caught in a pincer between two dynamics of music consumption:

1. Unprecedented access for consumers

For the first time, users could get at more music than they could ever buy. Let's not forget that back then, music was something you bought... or copied onto cassette.

2. Two very different kinds of use

• For the aficionados, it meant wider access to works they probably would have bought anyway. Their music budget was often substantial.
• For casual listeners, or at least that's what we chose to believe to reassure ourselves, downloads mostly replaced... listening to the radio. At the time, the easiest way to hear a popular song was still to turn on the radio.

The question of distribution, to which I actively contributed, ended up at the heart of the shift.

Among other things, I advised several artists on the electronic scene to team up with the label Warp, which was then launching Bleep, one of the first legal MP3 download platforms.

That approach later inspired services like Bandcamp, built on a simple idea:

let people buy music as MP3s, with most of the revenue going to the artist.

The problem, of course, was that artists found themselves saddled with distribution contracts completely unsuited to this new world:

• If they wanted to release their MP3s, they were blocked by their distributor, which refused to put their music online.

• If they wanted to get paid, they ran into the total absence of any viable solution (before Apple came along).

• If they wanted no distribution at all, their record labels were simply unable to prevent it.

A waking nightmare, especially since, for some artists, digital wasn't even covered in the contracts they had signed, which forced the majors to hastily extend existing agreements, often at the cost of bitter renegotiations. Other artists, locked in by contract, no longer had any say even as a new revolution was knocking at their door.

Which is a shame, because at the time there was an opportunity to use the Internet as a marketing tool and reach new audiences. Few people seized it, except perhaps Public Enemy, Alanis Morissette, Prince, and of course Daft Punk, who built their first online music club, the Daft Club. Beyond that, there was a real opportunity to build communities. We were still a long way, back then, from the creator model, even though all the building blocks were already there.

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We know what happened next.

Steve Jobs offered the majors a new deal: distribute music on the iPod through the Music Store, in a proprietary, non-MP3 format, with a 30% commission on every sale. It was the start of a new standard.

Then came Daniel Ek, who understood that download distribution was already obsolete. It could itself be replaced by continuous, frictionless distribution: streaming. Spotify quickly became the norm.

Twenty years after MP3's heyday, old-school music downloading has practically disappeared. It survives only in niches:

• WAV files, for mixing in clubs without paying for entire collections all over again

• Rare tracks that can't be found on SoundCloud or Spotify

While most consumers have switched to Spotify and its equivalents, a few pockets of resistance remain:

platforms like Bandcamp, or online radio stations like SomaFM, which carry on, against the current.

What we witnessed was a transfer of monopoly.

The monopoly of the record companies (producers and distributors) turned into the monopoly of the streamers. To buy themselves an honorable peace, the streaming platforms offered the majors, and some of the biggest labels, a stake in their capital.

That guarantees them income in the form of dividends and, incidentally, lets them avoid paying their artists out of that money, since it isn't royalties.

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