Now that the Atlantic Monthly no longer charges for access, I thought it would be a good idea to link to the September 2000 article titled "The Heavenly Jukebox" by Charles C. Mann. At the time it was published -- years before iTunes was even launched -- the article captured better than any other the potential, pitfalls and issues surrounding digital media. Today, the article is a time capsule that stands out as a very prescient examination of the issues surrounding the industry's reaction to file-sharing and digital distribution. It is well researched and heavy on historical references. Here's a tidbit:

In the short run the struggle is for control of the heavenly jukebox. Technophiles claim that the major labels, profitable concerns today, will rapidly cease to exist, because the Internet makes copying and distributing recorded music so fast, cheap, and easy that charging for it will effectively become impossible. Adding to the labels' fears, a horde of dot-coms, rising from the bogs of San Francisco like so many stinging insects, is trying to hasten their demise. Through their trade association, the Recording Industry Association of America, the labels are fighting back with every available weapon: litigation, lobbying, public relations, and, behind the trenches, jiggery-pokery with technical standards. Caught in the middle are musicians, Metallica among them, who believe that their livelihoods will soon be menaced by their own audiences.

At stake in the long run is the global agora: the universal library-movie theater-television-concert hall-museum on the Internet. The legal and social precedents set by Metallica v. Napster -- and half a dozen other e-music lawsuits -- are likely to ramify into film and video as these, too, move online. When true electronic books, e-magazines, and e-newspapers become readily available, their rules of operation may well be shaped by the creation of the heavenly jukebox. Music, according to a National Research Council report released last November, is the "canary in the digital coal mine."

This is unfortunate. Silicon Valley denizens often refer generically to writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, actors, photographers, designers, and musicians as "content providers," as if there were no important differences among them. Yet the music industry -- tangled in packages of rights that exist nowhere else, burdened by the peculiar legacies of earlier conflicts -- is not like other culture industries, and digital technology is exerting different forces on it. Compared with writers and filmmakers, musicians are both more imperiled by the Internet and better able to slip past the threat. The music industry seems to have less room to maneuver. In consequence, it has been pushing for decisive judicial and legislative action. The Internet will become a principal arena for the clash of ideas that the Founders believed necessary for democracy. Allowing the travails of a single industry -- no matter how legitimate its concerns -- to decide the architecture of that arena would be a folly that could take a long time to undo.

In the last seven years, labels have merged, Sony and BMG tied the knot, numerous wholesale distributors and retailers have gone out of business, artists have disavowed traditional business models and EMI has been given a makeover by its private equity owner. But in the period in which you could almost hold three summer Olympics, record labels still exist (some indies are thriving), mobile devices have emerged as the next potential saviour, and the decline of the album has arguably done more damage to the industry than has file-sharing. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn't changed at all.

[music jobs] Brand and Online Marketing Manager at The Ascot Club/Am Only; Brooklyn, NY.