Music in Germany – Panorama

What can musicians do when nobody wants to buy their records anymore? Just take a glance into the World Wide Web and it’s clear to see: opportunities for becoming famous there have never been greater. But when it comes to making money, that’s when things get difficult.












Music has never been cheaper than today. At least that’s what many users on the Internet think. In iTunes’ online music store, prices for tracks start at 69 cent per song, with albums being sold for anything from €6.99. The Apple store’s competitor Amazon has even been known to go cheaper. During the pilot phase, buyers could stock up on popular records for €4.99. And all from the comfort of their own desktop. When it comes to buying music, nobody need ever drive into crowded city centres again.

And if that’s still too expensive, there are always online file sharing networks, where users give each everything for free. It’s illegal, of course. In the lawsuit against the popular file sharing search engine The Pirate Bay in Sweden, the four main accused were sentenced to a year in prison each and ordered to pay a total of €2.7 million in damages. It won’t help much. To start off with, the verdict has been appealed. And second, lots of users believe they have every right to download files for free.

For today’s Internet generation, the concept of “intellectual property” is too fuzzy. Sweden’s “Pirate Party”, which campaigns for online liberties and for abolishing copyright laws, has managed to mobilise thousands of activists to take to the streets. The group now has offshoots in several countries; in Germany too.

Controlled Downloads

Jeremie Zimmermann, a net activist from Paris, who campaigns against the French law for Internet bans, which threatens users caught sharing files three times with a cap on their online access for a period of several months, no longer believes the concept of earning money with “1:1” copies, as he calls them, works. “It’s over, finished”, the 31-year old says. The digital era has simply made it too easy to reproduce content without any loss in quality and too difficult to explain to today’s users why they should pay money for digital content. He even has an idea at the ready how artists will be able to make a living in future. People are still willing to pay good money for events, concerts, meetings with stars or even merchandising.

Big names in show business have already got the message. Stars like Madonna now sign contracts with so-called “omnimedia” corporations, which market the record distribution together with the concert tours. Accordingly, prices for concert tickets have almost quadrupled in recent years. Then there are artists, on the other hand, who choose to market themselves with radical new concepts by completely cutting out the middleman wherever they can. In the last few years, Trent Reznor, founder of the industrial rock formation Nine Inch Nails, has given away all of the basic versions of his albums to download for free. To get more – anything from exclusive remixes to traditional vinyl albums with lots of additional features and extras – users have to pay.

A balance between “free” and “paid for” has also been struck by new kinds of licenses; for instance, the so-called Creative Commons (CC) license, which lets copyright owners allow free use of works for non-commercial purposes, but lets them request credit in the form of cash for commercial use of the work. The idea behind it is make it easier to distribute cultural works without copyright owners having to fully waive their rights.

The Blossoming of the File Sharing Network

In Germany, the topic of music and how to finance it in the long-term has also become the subject of hot debate. In the spring of 2009 three events in Berlin discussed the future of the music industry. The congress to accompany the “Transmediale” media festival investigated the opportunities and risks that the changes to the music industry would bring. Simultaneously, a whole weekend of debates at the Hebbel Theatre focused on the topic of “Music, Money and Community after Digitalisation”. In the meantime, the “Audio Poverty” festival and congress illustrated that the new way of life in the post-CD era might not be quite as easy as expected. Ekkehard Ehlers, one of the curators of the congress, has already experienced some of the difficulties first-hand. For every 1,000 copies of his album A Life Without Fear, despite being fêted by the German press, 25,000 were downloaded illegally. Ehlers felt he had been robbed by his own fans.

One last resort could be the so-called “culture flat fee” put forward and demanded by online activists and an increasing number of people with influence in the culture industry. The idea is that all users pay a fee together with their Internet access bills, and that this fee is then distributed to the artists. In exchange, users are free to help themselves to file sharing networks. However, what is still totally unclear is how to define a distribution key fair to everybody’s interests.