THE CD PLAYER PLUS - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

UHF Magazine No. 87 was published in October, 2009. All
contents are copyright 2009 by Broadcast Canada. They
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EDITORIAL: Paul Bergman, Steve Bourke, Toby Earp, Reine
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4 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
Editorial
Changes
There is no free, there’s only “who’s paying.”
I’ve just heard that phrase on the radio. The subject was water, but it seems
to me equally suited to the changing role of the media: music, movies, television,
newspapers, and of course magazines like this one.
But how do you convince people in the age of the Internet that there’s no
such thing as free? Isn’t the Net full of free information? And was it not said
that “information wants to be free”?
Actually, not quite. The phrase is from Stewart Brand, whose work with
The Whole Earth Catalog and its later offshoots was a seminal influence on
UHF. Brand’s entire phrase reads like this:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life. On
the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it
out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting
against each other.
The World Wide Web did not yet exist when Brand said that, in 1984, but
once it arrived it greatly lowered the cost of getting information “out there.”
Putting out music meant pressing an LP or a CD, packaging it and shipping
it. Today the music can be sent to anyone who wants it for only the cost of
bandwidth, which keeps dropping. Putting out news meant typesetting,
making printing plates, churning paper through giant presses, then trucking
the publication to thousands of newsstands. Today the same news is available
worldwide, for free.
Only who’s paying?
Television was free, because advertisers were paying for the privilege of
pitching their products. Today a majority of TV channels are pay channels.
You can actually buy programs at the iTunes store, and DVD stores are filled
with full-season collections of Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and Lost. Radio
was free, with sponsors, donors or taxpayers picking up the high cost of running
powerful transmitters. Today a radio program can be streamed on the
Internet, not for free but nearly.
The trouble with information that can be put “out there” for next to nothing
is that just anyone can put it out. That has made blogging and Facebook
possible, to be sure, but you still need to ask who’s paying. Remember that
companies are willing to spend millions of dollars to air a 30-second commercial
during the Super Bowl. You think they won’t leap at the chance of
getting “information” to you over an almost-free medium like the Internet?
On radio and TV you mostly know what is programming and what is a commercial.
On the Internet, don’t count on it.
I don’t mean to sound as though I’m anti-Web. Our arrival on the Web,
which dates from 1996, has given UHF its worldwide presence. Of course it
will, more and more, force shifts in our business model, as it has done with
the record industry, Hollywood, and the newspapers.
Oh…and about that phrase with which I began? It was on a CBC radio
program called Outfront. Ironically, it’s one of the programs CBC cut last
June, for lack of funds. Until now the program has been free, only now no
one is paying.