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Access denied
In
June the BBC offered free downloads of live Beethoven concerts
broadcast on Radio 3. It was a huge success. But not everyone was
pleased. The Independent (10 July) reported:
“The
BBC has been lambasted by classical music labels for making all nine
of Beethoven's symphonies available for free download over the
Internet. This week the BBC will announce there have been more than a
million downloads of the symphonies during the month-long scheme. But
the initiative has infuriated the bosses of leading classical record
companies who argue the offer undermines the value of music and that
any further offers would be unfair competition.”
Yes
of course (but they must mean the price, not the value, of music). If
something is available free, nobody’s going to pay for it. That is
the ultimate “unfair competition”. But the real question is
different: if something can be provided free at little or no extra
cost, why isn’t it?
The
answer is that, under capitalism, the basic economic law is “no
profit, no production”. So, no private capitalist is going to
invest in providing something free to people. What would be the
point? There’d be no profit in it.
The
only institution which could do this would be the state, using
resources obtained through taxation from the private capitalist
sector. In Britain the state does in fact provide a number of
services that are free at the point and time of use: roads, schools,
parts of the health service, for instance. But these are seen as
services for the capitalist class as a whole and as not involving
competition with capitalist businesses trying to make a profit out of
supplying the same service. (Certainly, there are capitalist firms
lobbying for the right to cherry-pick the profitable parts of these
services but no capitalist is going to be interested in investing in
side streets or in rural roads.)
If
the state does venture to supply free a potentially profitable
service – as the BBC did on this occasion – then the private
sector squeals “unfair, subsidised competition”. As the British
state and the BBC are fully committed to capitalism and its logic,
the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, rushed to reassure the
profit-seeking commercial suppliers of music recordings:
“In
a speech to the British Phonographic Industry, the trade association
for the recording industry, Mr Thompson tried to allay fears from the
commercial sector. The anxiety, he said, ‘boils down to two
questions: is this the start of some new regular service from the
BBC, in which, without warning and consultation, the public will be
offered chunks of music free at the point of download which will
inevitably distort the commercial market in music? And second, are
there any limits to what the BBC might download? Could we wake up one
morning to discover that half the BBC's musical archive is available
on the net? The answer to these two questions is: no and no.’”
(Guardian, 21 July).
But
that precisely is what could well happen in socialism. Not just half
the BBC’s musical archives but the whole of them, as well as all
other musical archives, could be made available for people to
download freely. And why not? Let those against the provision of free
music - and free telephones, free electricity, free transport, etc,
for that matter – put up a case for restricting access to what
people need and want when the resources to do this exist. If they
can.
Cooking
the Books (1) 
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