CD-copying clubs burn record giants
By Frank Green
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 9, 2003
The CDs arriving in Cory Freeman's mail these days are as esoteric as a rap version of "Rigoletto": Caribbean pop by Pato Banton and Tito Puente, alternative rock by the White Stripes and Stereolab, electronic music by fourhourwindow and Negativeland.
But don't rush out to the record store to buy your own copies.
Freeman is part of a CD-copying club known as BurnSter, whose dozen or so members download copyrighted material from the Internet and other sources, make custom discs replete with elaborate packaging, then distribute them to the entire group.
"You never know what to expect," said Freeman, a nurse who is compiling his first CD for the San Diego club, a compilation of songs by alternative-rock bands. "You get to experience music you otherwise would never have heard."
The recording industry, which has seen sales dip in recent years partly because of music piracy, has a new enemy: Highly organized groups of audiophiles who swap thousands of homemade CDs of popular songs, many of them burned from illicit file-sharing sites on the Internet.
It is difficult to estimate how many CD-burning clubs exist nationwide, although there are at least four in San Diego County with members busily duplicating the latest works by Fatboy Slim, Sleater-Kinney and kindred name acts.
"I compile and send out one CD every four months or so, and I get about 15 new ones back," said Paul, a restaurant manager who is a member of the CD-copying club CompSongs. "It's fun, and I usually learn something about other musical genres."
CompSongs is composed of 15 industrial-rock and acid-jazz fans, some of them students at San Diego State University.
Since their club's inception two years ago, CompSongs members have produced about 100 CDs jammed with thousands of tracks mostly lifted from the Internet.
The packaging on CompSongs CDs typically is primitive, with little artwork and with song titles scrawled on a paper insert.
"It would have cost me a fortune if I had had to go to a record store to get this stuff," said Paul, who asked that his last name not be used.
Paul added that he hasn't spent money on prerecorded music in years because there is so much of it available free through his home computer.
Music copying has been the bane of the record industry since the introduction in the late 1960s of cassette tapes, which allowed record buyers to duplicate the latest vinyl releases by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones for a friend or two.
But the growth of the Internet has given listeners a far more user-friendly tool for fattening their audio libraries at virtually no expense.
Some illicit file-sharing services on the Web list nearly the entire repertoires of bands such as U2 and Rage Against the Machine, available free.
State-of-the-art CD-burning machines, which now come as built-in features on some computer models, have made it a snap to produce digitally pristine CD copies in a matter of minutes.
Thus, the rise of sophisticated music-copy collectives that are beginning to strike sour notes at the big record labels.
"We are familiar with such clubs across the country, and we want to put them on notice that the activity taking place is illegal," said Frank Creighton, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "We will take legal action against these clubs" if they can be found.
Creighton said copyright law prohibits any unauthorized duplication of recordings, even if the music was originally bought through legitimate retail channels and even if no money has changed hands.
Sales of prerecorded music in the United States fell last year by 11 percent, to $11.95 billion, David Barrington, a researcher at Music Week World, said yesterday. U.S. sales are expected to drop 6.3 percent this year and 1.7 percent in 2004, Barrington said.
Some record-store chains such as Sam Goody and The Wherehouse reportedly are about to close some outlets because of the downturn in sales.
The RIAA blames much of the problem on young, Internet-savvy music consumers, 35 percent of whom use their computers to download songs, according to an industry-sponsored survey.
Moreover, 24 percent of respondents said they had acquired 11 or more burned CDs in the past year.
But some music industry critics said record labels have created the CD-burning problem themselves by pricing CDs too high and cutting out the production of singles (which forces consumers to buy entire albums), among other marketing practices.
"The RIAA's anti-piracy efforts are stupid and dishonest," said Dave Marsh, a former editor at Rolling Stone magazine and publisher of the Rock & Rap Confidential newsletter.
Marsh said copying may actually expose customers to new acts and compel them to buy additional product. Indeed, several members of local CD-burning clubs said they have bought many discs after hearing the artists' music on collective discs.
"Participating in BurnSter is merely an avenue to explore music I've never encountered before, as opposed to pirating from other sources and never purchasing music again," BurnSter member Freeman said. "I have always purchased music, and I intend to continue purchasing music."
At BurnSter, a member is assigned to create a new disc about every two weeks.
"Each CD should contain approximately 9 to 15 songs. No more than two songs per artist," reads the list of club rules. "CDs, not audio tapes. No exceptions. . . . Songs may be either ripped from existing CDs or acquired via the World Wide Web."
For some, the toughest part of the BurnSter project has been creating eye-popping packaging, not the compilation of tunes.
Some BurnSter album art has featured everything from strips of blue carpet glued to the album's jewel box to an edgy, off-color photograph purportedly showing a tourist who was a victim of the World Trade Center attacks.
"It took me less than an hour to make a master file (of music) and to push the Record button on my computer, but four days to come up with the packaging," said a disc jockey who goes by the name of m.perro, who asked that his real name not be used.
M.perro said he doesn't consider himself a digital-music outlaw.
"The RIAA is a bloodsucking mechanism for big record companies," he said. "We're doing them a favor by giving exposure to this music."
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Frank Green: (619) 293-1233; frank.green@uniontrib.com |
