Religion And Music
I read a lot about how music companies are attempting to put copy controls (or “DRM”) into music tracks. My friend Barbara was faced with this very issue when she tried to get a track onto her portable mp3 player. The CD she bought was copy protected and could not be easily ripped to mp3, while the track she paid for and downloaded was copy protected and would not load onto her machine. Her liking for this song became transformed into annoyance.
Lately I read that Apple’s DRM for its iTunes Music Store has been broken by DVDJon, the same wunderkid who figured out how to break the CSS copy protection on DVDs. I’ve read lots of screeds from people arguing that since the natural price of a copy of a digital product approaches zero, so to should the market price. Attempts to enforce higher-than-zero prices for copies of digital media somehow fall foul of the mystical constraints of economic rationality theory.
But I suspect the truth is more complex than that. All elegant arguments in favour of economic rationality only work in a society where we are all perfectly rational and prices and availabilty are not generated and constrained by culture and social practice.
It’s obvious that if you look around, you find many examples of artificially high prices for goods or services that are maintained through social contracts. My favourite example is religion.
Now, most religions present the idea of a supreme being, usually some variety of Sky God, to which people can owe allegience in return for unspecified favours and considerations. Most hold that a personal relationship with this Sky God is possible. Yet most religions features a stratified hierarchy, with membership dues and fees tacked on.
In fact, many institutional religions have codified the financial obligations of their believers into law or custom and many people are extremely willing to keep paying money for something that, logically, they could obtain for free.
Throughout history, faced with falling membership and diminishing fees, many established or state religions have been forced to move from comfortable, unspoken legitimacy to bold, in your face regulations and legal manoeuvring to force people to pay their dues, on pain of legal sanction, torture, or death.
Religion is one social practice that is both created and consumed, and whose entry fees are maintained above zero through sanction, custom, and “tradition”. Music is another.
Despite several centuries of especial religious market development, and the development of many hundreds and thousands of individualistic cults and “new age” spiritual movements, most developed nations are still characterized by large populations that willingly pay above-zero fees to organizations in order to reach some accommodation with the Sky God. It’s not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.