Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back [Hardcover]

Robert Levine (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 25, 2011

How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track.

On the Internet, “information wants to be free.” This memorable phrase shaped the online business model, but it is now driving the media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business. Today, newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half since file sharing became common, TV ratings are plum­meting as viewership migrates online, and publishers face off against Amazon over the price of digital books.

In Free Ride, Robert Levine narrates an epic tale of value destruction that moves from the corridors of Congress, where the law was passed that legalized YouTube, to the dorm room of Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster; from the bargain-pricing dramas involving iTunes and Kindle to Google’s fateful decision to digitize first and ask questions later. Levine charts how the media industry lost control of its destiny and suggests innovative ways it can resist the pull of zero.

Fearless in its reporting and analysis, Free Ride is the busi­ness history of the decade and a much-needed call to action.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Free Ride

“A book that should change the debate about the future of culture….With this stylishly written and well-reported manifesto, Levine has become a leading voice on one side of our most hotly contested debate involving law and technology.”
—Jeffrey Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

"Turbo-reported....Free Ride is a timely and impressive book--part guilt trip, part wake-up call, and full of the kind of reporting that could only have been done with a book advance from an Old Media company."
—Businessweek

"[A] smart, caustic tour of the modern culture industry."
—Fortune

“Brilliant…A crash course in the existential problems facing the [media].” 
—Richard Morrison, The Times 

“The most convincing defense of the current predicament of the creative industries that I have read.”      
—James Crabtree, Financial Times

“With penetrating analysis and insight, Levine, a former executive editor of Billboard magazine, dissects the current economic climate of the struggling American media companies caught in the powerful fiscal grip of the digital industry…. This incisive book is a start at an informed dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Can the culture business survive the digital age?  That’s the burning question Robert Levine poses in his provocative new book.  And his answer is one that will get your blood boiling. Rich with revealing stories and telling tales, Free Ride makes a lucid case that information is actually expensive – and that it’s only the big technology firms profiting most from the work of others that demand information be free.” 
—Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA
 
“One of the great issues of the digital age is how people who create content will be able to make a living. Robert Levine’s timely and well-researched book provides a valuable look at how copyright protection was lost on the internet and offers suggestions about how it could be restored.”
—Walter Isaacson, President/CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin 
 
“This book thoroughly documents a wide-spread outbreak of cyber amnesia. Despite libertarian delusions, industries often get Free Rides, especially in their early days, but they eventually give back.  Taxpayers build roads, then get hired to build cars.  The Internet gives back a lot in exchange for its Free Ride, but one thing it defiantly isn’t giving back is a way for enough people to make a living. No matter how amusing or addictive the Internet becomes, its foundation will crumble unless it starts returning the favors it was given and still depends on.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget
 
“Free Ride is a brilliantly written book that exposes the dark side of the Internet. A must read for anyone interested in the horrific undermining of our intellectual culture.”
—Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood
 
“Robert Levine deftly dissects the self-serving Orwellian freedom-speak being served up by Silicon Valley’s digital new lords as they amass fortunes devaluing the work of artists, journalists and other old-fashioned ‘content creators.’ Free Ride begs us to remove our blinders and take a hard look down a cultural dead-end road.”
—Fred Goodman, author of Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis

“Without being a Luddite, Levine makes the phony digital media gurus of our day seem as simple-minded as their slogans.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, author of How the End Begins and Explaining Hitler

 

About the Author

ROBERT LEVINE was most recently executive editor of Billboard mag­azine. His articles on technology, business, and culture have appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Condé Nast Portfolio, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Travel & Leisure. He lives in New York.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (October 25, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385533764
• ISBN-13: 978-0385533768
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #531,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent examination of Digital Piracy from the perspective of the Content Providers November 26, 2011

By Brett

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I started Robert Levine's "Free Ride" with a deeply skeptical mindset. As someone who has followed the topics of digital innovation, the digital economy, and piracy in the news and blogosphere, I tend to be wary of anything that really amounts to obsolete companies trying to preserve an advantage through regulatory and legal means in the face of technological innovation.

This is why I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It's a fascinating history of the rise of digital piracy as it affected (and affects) the major "content" businesses (Music, Newspapers, Publishing, Television, and Film), and particularly the divide between the digital technology companies (such as Google) and the content industries. Quite often, I finished a chapter of the book much more sympathetic to these businesses than I had been before, particularly when Levine really delves into the economics of the "content" businesses and the piracy affecting them. While I don't entirely agree with him (at times, I think he's a little too wed to the idea of keeping the content businesses large and stable), I strongly recommend this book to any interested in these topics.

Levine focuses on those five main "content" businesses, but the real heart of the book (the most researched and detailed, including Levine's proposal for dealing with piracy) lie in the sections about the Music Industry. He goes into great detail about how digital piracy unfolded on the industry in the form of Napster, File-Sharing, and Digital Lockers, and how the Music Industry reacted to these changes (and the proliferation of digital technology plus the web). Particularly interesting to me was his writings on the economics of the Music Industry and each method of distributing music (such as CD Albums versus iTunes singles), as well as the details about the rise and fall of Napster in the late 1990s.

It is from the Music Industry that Levine also draws his proposal for resolving the issue of getting rights-holders paid for the use of their content on the web: "Blanket Licenses", or the right for people to use all the music they want as long as they pay for the license to an organization that then distributes the revenue (or if they subscribe to services that do this). He points out that this is already a system in place for paying songwriters and music publishing, and that several European telecoms/Internet Service Providers (such as TDC in the Netherlands). There is increasing support for it in continental Europe, although the US music industry continues to be wary.

This is not to dismiss the rest of the book. Levine also delves quite well into how e-books are changing the Publishing Industry, mostly in the context of the conflict between tech companies that want to sell book-reading devices using books as a "loss leader", and the actual publishing companies that are afraid that this "loss leading" will destroy any other retailers who can't afford to take a loss on book sales to sell physical readers. He makes a very convincing argument that it was foolish for newspapers to put all their articles online for free, instead of reserving most of them for subscribers (particularly the more profitable "print" subscribers that usually account for more than 90% of a newspaper's revenue). Levine points out that Online Video is a major threat to cable television, the heart of the modern television business (their reaction is "TV Everywhere", allowing anyone with a cable subscription to watch television shows and movies on any devices they own). And quite frequently, Levine points out the divide between the technology companies that have benefited from a "free web" that permits piracy (such as Youtube getting popular on the back of pirated video content that users post), and the content providers hurt by this. A great deal of his anger is particularly reserved for Google, which has been a major player in dampening efforts to strengthen copyright enforcement online.

That is not to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Levine on these issues. His chapters on the newspaper business are very convincing, and I'm much more sympathetic to the television and music businesses after reading this book. Nonetheless, I think Levine has a bias towards high-priced, professional content output, such as high-priced shows on cable subscriptions. There are several points in the book where he's dismissive towards amateurs and "hobbyists", and I get the impression that he would gladly make the trade-off of higher cable prices for higher-priced (and presumably better) content such as "Mad Men". That's a fair opinion, but it's like complaints about how the quality of air travel degraded after de-regulation allowed cheaper airfare prices in the US: quality was lost, but far more people had access and the ability to enter the market. It's important not to get too wedded to the present state of the "content" market, fears about a "twenty-first century economy with a seventeeth-century content business" aside.

Despite some of my disagreements with Levine, I DO wholeheartedly recommend that you read this book. It's an excellent piece, both readable and well-supported, from a perspective that tends to be dismissed as entirely self-serving and "luddite" in the debates over digital piracy.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book on important issues December 9, 2011

By A. J Terry VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've worked in book and magazine publishing (including self-publishing) for almost 30 years. For the past several, I've spent a lot of energy trying to convince new self-publishers that piracy and overly large promotional giveaways merely create or reinforce reader expectations that everything will be free, undermining not only those publishers' own businesses but others. I've also spent a great deal of energy explaining to readers that it typically takes several years to write a book, and that writers need to pay for their groceries just like readers do. Also that publishers provide valuable services to writers, including editing, proofreading, book design, page layout, indexing, marketing, and more; and that the publisher also has overhead to run the business. The common alternative is self-publication of inferior books (because most writers do not have the skills to do all publishing tasks at a professional level) or the writer paying freelancers (which doesn't make the book any cheaper for readers than if it had been "traditionally" published). Retailers (online and off) also provide valuable services: Although readers technically can browse all over the net looking for self-published books, fact is, they don't bother. But they may well find the book at some venue such as Amazon--who does deserve payment for making the book much more accessible to readers.

I'm also often frustrated by the way people who want free books speak almost entirely in the same old slogans, such as "information should be free," "if you can't make money giving it away, you're outmoded and need a new business model," and so forth. Robert Levine, author of Free Ride, does a good job of examining the sources of these slogans--they often emanate from large companies that make a great deal of money selling ads next to other people's pirated and/or giveaway works. He explodes the illusion that numerous companies (which he names) whose businesses are funded this way are actually operating in consumers' interests.

I do disagree with Levine's suggestion that a good solution to the problem of making money off the net is blanket licenses, where consumers pay a flat fee to an ISP (or some other company) for unlimited downloads. Not all works cost the same amount of time or money to produce, nor do they all have inherent audiences of the same size. I believe that scholarly works with limited audiences, and the like, are at least as culturally valuable as the latest beach novel, but blanket licenses tend to reward pop culture to the detriment of everything else. Also, before recommending collecting agencies (in addition to blanket licenses), Levine really should have researched how these work in countries where they are more widely used. Writers in these countries have told me that the collecting agencies (of course) cost money to run, and once they get their cut, the writer sees very little of the money collected. I am not against middlemen: The publishing industry needs them. But I don't see any point in adding unnecessary middlemen to the chain that already exists.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Incisive and interesting analysis of copyright December 19, 2011

By rbnn

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Copyright protection has undergone a sea change over the last decade or so. What was once considered philosophically and legally axiomatic - that creators should have control over and benefit financially from their work - has rapidly eroded. Nowadays, in most cases there is not that much practical protection for musicians, authors, and other creative content creators; and their associated industries have thereby lost influence, resources, and prestige. Most popular legal argument cheers this erosion along, offering various self-serving justifications for it (e.g., that it's progress; that creators' business should change; that creators' work is of poor quality; that piracy actually helps creators' business, etc.).

This book stands as a rare counterbalance to the pro-piracy chorus. It's obviously frustrating to be on the dissenting side of one of these trans-national cultural movements, but the author is able to make his case in a way that is nonetheless entertaining and insightful. He deftly meshes solid legal analysis with neat stories.

The strongest part of the book is unquestionably his detailed analysis of the effect of copyright erosion generally, and specifically on the music industry. Indeed, the analysis here is far and away the best I have seen. Levine goes back to the Statute of Anne, and carefully traces several key cases, including Acuff-Rose, Sony, the extension acts, and so on, since. His legal analysis is spot on and accurate, and I was frankly quite surprised that he was not a lawyer. (Perhaps he ought to have pointed out that all most material is in fact copyrighted at the time of creation - sometimes he seems to use "copyright" for "registered copyright" in a few places, as when he talks about the percentage of copyrighted material among some network, but this is minor).

He has a terrific historical analysis of the history of copy protection, attempts to copy protect CDs, and various failed industry standards. His treatment of the Metallica stance on copyright is superb if poignant. He carefully and accurately traces through things like Napster, Kazaa, and later iTunes, and the effect of all these on revenues. Overall, these chapters are certainly worth the price of the book.

His discussion of film and movie piracy is also careful and persuasive. He also has a very good overview of book publishing economics and why, for example, Kindles are not quite the boon to authors that Kindle owners like to pontificate about.

I did disagree with the author in a couple of places. First, I felt he made too big a deal about Boxee, some sort of television device I'd never heard of. (The author likewise doesn't discuss the possibility of desktop computers replacing TVs - only mentioning laptops, tablets, etc.).

Second, I felt Levine's treatment of Google Books was unfair. Levine correctly notes that some publishers and authors objected because they might want to reprint books that are currently out-of-print. But Levine ignores the fact that these authors could easily opt out of Google Books if they wanted to. Levine also ignores the problem of "orphan books", where copyright is hard to ascertain and the owners don't care enough to bargain, which requires an opt-out system for Google Books to work. Levine cites the argument that Google Books should be disallowed from becoming a full library because doing so could prevent other companies like Microsoft from making a similar effort. But the companies leading the charge against Google Books have no intention of making such a project, nor will they ever. It seems odd to prevent Google from doing something with the argument that if Google succeeds, other companies won't in the future.

One interesting point, by the way, that the book glossed over was how often antitrust considerations prevented the many relatively small content creation businesses or artists from joining together effectively to promulgate new standards or new partnerships. With the very loose confederations that are less likely to raise antitrust issues, it is extremely difficult to get the buy-in from the production and distribution chain required to make the standard effective.

Still, overall the book is fun, it's entertaining, it's accurate, and it's fair.