March 30, 2000 | The refrain snaking through Salon's recent article on why a lot of professional musicians hate Napster -- the software that lets users easily swap MP3 music files -- is familiar and catchy: One artist after another steps forward to state, with a hint of indignation in their voices, that "artists should get paid for their work." That may seem to most of us today like common sense, a law of nature, but in fact it is a concept of relatively recent historical vintage. In popular music, the notion of a class of professional songwriters and musicians who might support themselves -- and just maybe get rich -- through their music is not much more than a century old.------------------------------------------------------------------------Scott Rosenberg+ Biography+ Archives------------------------------------------------------------------------New technologies -- first sheet music, then radio and the phonograph -- made pop-music professionalism possible. So suggesting that other new technologies might change the landscape again isn't, as the indignant artists would have it, a violation of their rights or a fundamental upending of the moral order; it is merely observation of a historical process at work.Historical process is, to be sure, impersonal and uncaring, and inevitability alone doesn't render structural changes in the music business that might cut into a superstar's profit, or force the members of a marginal band to take day jobs, any less painful. When steam power drove the hand-loom weavers of pre-Victorian Britain out of business, they took to smashing machines under the banner of mythical "General Ludd"; today's recording artists, fearful of being similarly economically displaced, have taken their Luddism into the legal system, and are attempting to smash the new music machines with lawsuits.Rather than insist that the way the music world does business today is the only way imaginable, it behooves artists to take a l...
