Music enthusiast or lawbreaker?
The record industry has long been upset by consumer home taping of albums, compact discs, and pre-recorded cassettes. Industry estimates of revenue lost to manufacturers and artists run into multi-million dollar figures. Many proposals have been made to rectify the situation, including a tax on blank audio tape and tape recorders which would be used to reimburse artists and record companies for lost revenue.
These measures have been bitterly opposed by the manufacturers of blank tape and related consumer electronics equipment, who argue that such measures would hurt their sales and infringe on the rights of consumers who use the technology to record non-copyrighted material such as phone messages and dictation. In addition, the consumer electronics groups argue that home taping actually stimulates sales in the long run by functioning as a kind of promotional tool that introduces people to new artists they might not otherwise have investigated.
The furor seemed to reach a fever pitch during the late 80s, when the arrival of digital audio tape (DAT) was impending. In a nutshell, DAT is a recording/playback medium that combines the convenience of the cassette tape with the sound quality of a compact disc. Its superior sound reproduction allows anyone with two DAT decks to make copies that are almost equal in quality to the original.
With DAT on the horizon, calls for some kind of congressional action became louder and efforts were made to block the importation on DAT equipment. Both the record and consumer electronic industries have funded studies on home taping to bolster their assertions, but the results have been suspect because of possible biases. It was clear that an independent study was necessary, so Congress called on the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency that performs independent analyses of the potential social impacts of new (and often controversial) technology.
In conjunction with the OTA, the Washington, D.C. firm of Schulman, Ronca, and Bucavalas, Inc. (SRBI) was chosen to undertake an unbiased, independent, and comprehensive study of consumer uses of home taping technology.
John Boyle, senior vice president of SRBI and the firm's project director for the survey, says that previous studies tended to confirm the positions of their sponsors.
"In arguing their cases, both sides came forward with a host of surveys, some dating back to the late 70s. The studies done by the consumer electronics industry seemed to show that consumers weren't using (cassette decks) to create copies, but primarily to make personalized selection tapes, to tape music from the radio or for voice recording. On the other hand, the recording industry surveys showed that literally millions of albums were being copied, and that hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues were being lost by the industry."
In addition, some studies were simply outdated, or were performed before the advent of technology such as the Walkman-type personal stereo, which has greatly increased the popularity of the cassette tape format. Finally, any comparison of study results was difficult because of disparate methodologies.
Advisory panel
For each survey it conducts, the OTA sets up an advisory panel of representatives of what it calls the "stakeholders" in the issue at hand. For the home taping study, the stakeholders included record industry manufacturers and retailers, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Consumer Electronics Group, as well as technology experts and labor and consumer representatives.
One member of the advisory panel was William Livingstone, current editor at large, and former editor in chief of Stereo Review magazine. He says that as a music enthusiast, he felt his role was to represent the consumer interest in the process.
"We were asked to state our positions, and to suggest what we thought could be accomplished and should be accomplished with the survey, and discuss facets of the questions that should be examined. Our role was strictly advisory, but we were invited to read drafts and comment on them. I certainly felt that everyone got his say."
Partner to the advisory panel was a survey working group that included a number of survey experts who were asked to oversee the process and contribute to the survey design and development. Also in the working group were more than 20 other reviewers, including representatives of stakeholder groups, other OTA contractors working on the study, and independent technical experts.
Design process
The questionnaire design process took three and a half months (which seemed like no time at all to everyone except the OTA, Boyle says, which was working under the congressional action deadline of six months from the start of the survey process). In all, 13 drafts of the questionnaire were prepared. Each draft was reviewed internally by the OTA to make sure it met congressional needs and then examined by members of the advisory panel and survey working groups by mail, in meetings, and lengthy conference calls.
During the questionnaire review process, a number of issues were discussed. Initially, the OTA intended to use the survey to investigate consumer habits in audio, video, and computer copying, Boyle says.
"The congressional intent was that the survey and the other work that the OTA was doing would address the issue of whether the same type of home taping behavior that existed in audio taping would also apply to video and computer copying. If Congress had to come up with a solution, would one solution fit all?"
But obtaining information in so many areas would be difficult within the survey's proposed 20 minute interview time boundary, so the computer copying questions were eliminated, and the video questions were scaled back to yield enough data to make some general comparisons between the two behaviors.
Interview only tapers
Some reviewers wanted the survey to interview only tapers to allow for a more detailed look at the role of taping in the home. But the OTA believed that it was important to include non-tapers in the survey to understand the similarities and differences between the attitudes of the two groups.
In the end, the reviewing groups suggested three questions that the study should answer:
-how much audio taping is done each year?
-how many sales of pre-recorded, copyrighted material are displaced by home taping?
-to what extent are sales of recordings stimulated by home taping?
"Both the recording industry and Congress felt it was necessary to get some sense of the magnitude of the home copying issue. People have argued about x number and y number; we wanted to come up with a valid estimate of what's going on. The industry wanted dollar figures, but OTA did not want to do that because of the limitations on survey methodology in coming out with hard dollar figures."
But how to get that information? Asking the respondent to do an inventory of their tape collection could potentially run into the problem of faulty recall, especially in breaking the main question into several sub-questions such as, how many tapes do you have in your house, how many are pre-recorded tapes that you purchased, how many were a gift, and. how many were made by copying concerts or other material from radio or television?
After much discussion, the decision was made to focus on recent behavior involving a specific event, such as the last time the respondent made or purchased a tape. Some hypothetical questions would be used, such as, "If you couldn't have made a tape of this material, would you have bought it?" but care would be taken to avoid basing analysis on responses to them.
Telephone interview
The home taping study used a 25 minute telephone interview, presented to respondents as a national survey on how the public uses audio and video technology. Boyle says that telephone interviewing method was chosen over others for cost and time considerations.
"An in-person survey of the same size would cost about 2.5 times what a telephone survey would. A primary reason for using in-person as opposed to telephone is that you don't want to exclude non-telephone households, but in terns of what we were looking at, the non-telephone households don't contribute much to the behavior under study. Plus, the survey had extremely complex skip patterns, and computer assisted telephone interviewing was much more efficient than trying to follow down a hard copy."
Music is important
The survey results clearly indicate that listening to music is very important for many people. Fifty-six percent of the total sample said that listening to music was "extremely" or "quite" important to them. Eighty-four percent reported owning one or more audiocassettes, and nearly half said they owned 1 to 50 audiotapes.
Nearly everyone surveyed had one or more types of audio playback equipment. And while the number of respondents owning record players was similar to that found in previous surveys, the percentage of the population with owning cassette players had more than doubled in the past ten years, from 38 % in 1978 to 94% in the OTA survey.
Reasons for taping
Home taping is widespread. Overall, the survey found that 4 out of 10 persons aged 10 or over had taped recorded music in some form, either from a pre-recorded cassette, record, compact disc, or a radio or television broadcast.
Making "tapes of their own records, cassettes, and CDs so that they can play them in their car, Walkman, or elsewhere" was the most common reason for home taping from pre-recorded formats in the last month, according to tapers aged 16 and over. The next most common reasons were "to create a customized program of music on tape" (23%), "to protect originals from damage and keep them from wearing out" (18%), and making tapes of friends' recordings "so that they don't have to buy them" (13%).
Cassettes were the most popular format when purchasing pre-recorded music, although about half of those who copied music made their most recent taping from a record-which is very different from conventional purchase patterns, because records now make up a very small portion of the music bought by the public.
A majority (57 %) of home music tapers who had taped one or more whole albums in their most recent taping used their own original record, cassette, or CD to make the tape.
"That has to do with convenience but also the attitude that, 'I bought it and I want to make a copy.' But from the standpoint of the music industry, making another copy for yourself is as bad as making one for a friend. It is a lost sale, to a certain extent," Boyle says.
The survey found evidence to back up the claims that home taping both displaces and stimulates sales. Data obtained from purchase intent-related questions indicate that about a fifth (22 %) of the most recent tapings displaced sales of pre-recorded music, Boyle says.
The OTA report notes that "the accurate measurement of sales stimulation in a retrospective interview was even more difficult than the estimate of sales displacement," but goes on to state that the survey did find evidence that taping also had a stimulative effect, though this effect couldn't be quantitatively measured.
Recording non-copyrighted material
Since proposed taxes on blank tape and on tape recorders could significantly affect tapers of non-copyrighted material, the study also investigated consumer habits in that area, measuring the level of home recording of non-copyrighted material and also the tapers' awareness of the grade of blank tape they used.
The survey found that 62 percent of respondents who had used tape recorders in the past year had taped material other than pre-recorded music, such as dictation, family members' voices, and reports. Put another way, nearly three out of four taping instances in the past month were for taping things other than prerecorded music.
One proposed way to avoid taxing those making tapes of non-copyrighted material would be to tax only the higher quality grades of tape used to record music. But the survey seems to indicate this idea would be troublesome. There is little discrimination in the grade of blank tape used: twenty-three percent of those taping non-copyrighted material, and 32 percent of music tapers were aware of the grade of tape they used to make their most recent recording.
"What's clear is, a lot of voice recording is being done, and it's being done by the same people who record music. By and large, the public doesn't have any idea of what grade of tape it's using," Boyle says.
Contrary to record industry suspicion, the widespread availability of dual-cassette and high-speed dubbing decks seemed to have little influence on the number of tapes made at home. This equipment was owned in approximately the same frequency by people who made few, many, or no homemade tapes.
"People were telling us, 'Look at the number of high speed dubbing decks out there!' But one of the things we found was that there was absolutely no strong relationship between owning that kind of copying technology and the likelihood of copying. As people bought more audio recording equipment it tended to have more features, but the technology, in terms of recording capability, didn't seem to have much to do with the likelihood of copying."
What did have an influence, Boyle says, was the number of recorder/player units in the household, because many tapes are made to convert the music to a more convenient form.
Ethics of home taping
Another of the survey's important purposes was to investigate public feelings towards the ethics of home taping and to proposed forms of regulation to deal with the problem of copyright infringement.
Respondents were asked to rate certain taping-related behaviors on a seven-point scale of personal acceptability, a 7 meaning the action was perfectly acceptable, a 1 meaning that it was not at all acceptable.
The majority of respondents felt it was perfectly acceptable to make a taped copy for their own use of a record, tape, or CD that they own. (Only 11 percent of the public felt it was unacceptable.) A similarly high number found it acceptable to "make a taped copy to give to a friend of a record, cassette or CD that you own."
But consumers drew the line at taping for personal gain. Seventy-six percent felt it was not acceptable (on the 1 to 3 scale) and two thirds found it not at all acceptable. "The public's attitude is, if you bought it, you can copy it. It's as if you bought the music. You can't sell it- the public's very clear on that-but if you want to make a copy to share with a friend, that's OK," Boyle says.
"Everybody is against piracy, everybody's against counterfeiting records, but I think a consumer ought to be able to tape something for his own use. What are the benefits of technology for, but for the use of the public?" says Stereo Review's William Livingstone.
The adult (17 or older) members of the sample were asked to use a similar scale to rate the fairness of a series of questions on proposed policy changes regarding home taping. Most felt the suggestion that "new audio recorders should be built so they can't copy commercial recordings" was unfair. Similar numbers felt that a proposal to make audio tapes uncopiable was either unfair or not at all fair.
Compensating copyright holders for losses due to home taping by placing fees on products also was deemed unfair. Most felt it was unfair that a fee should be charged on audio recorders and paid to copyright holders, and a similar number felt a fee on blank audiotapes was unfair.
Finally, 63 percent of national sample felt that the statement "Current home taping practices should be left unchanged," was fair, with 46 percent rating it perfectly fair.
Tapers are also buyers
Boyle says one of the study's most important findings was that music tapers are also music buyers, and that although home taping seems to be displacing sales, it may be something that the record industry will just have to live with.
"The thing that I stressed to the music industry in my review of the survey findings was, if you want to find this copyright violator, go and arrest every other person in the line at Tower Records, or any other music store, because the people who copy are also the people who purchase. There is only a very tiny group of people who only copy and don't purchase. The fact that there are relatively few people who are exclusively free riders out there suggests to me that you may want to leave well enough alone."
William Livingstone: "I compared the relationship between the artist and the record company and the public as a very delicately balanced ecosystem and if they went in there and started legislating it, they were likely to upset that balance in a way that would be detrimental to the interest of all of them.
"As a writer, I pointed out to (the music industry) that if they put a tax on tape, or a tax on tape decks or other recording equipment, they should certainly put a tax on photocopying machines and on the paper they use. Because the people who complain about violation of copyright think nothing of (photocopying) an article which supports their argument and sending it to everybody in sight. It would never occur to them to go out and buy another copy of the newspaper or magazine in which that article was published. But to me it is exactly the same kind of thing."
No public attacks
Boyle says that while the survey results support the contentions of both the record industry and the consumer electronics industry, neither group has publicly attacked the survey methods - which he partially credits to the work that went into creating the questionnaire.
"I think that the three and a half months spent fighting over the questionnaire may have been worthwhile because there wasn't the usual sniping and attacks on the research findings. There are arguments over interpretation of results-Is 10 percent a lot or a little? Should we be satisfied or should we be appalled? -but it was worthwhile because to the best of my knowledge, despite the importance of the study, there was no industry attack on the findings or on the methods."
Re-analyzing data
Just before the study was released last October, a settlement was reached that cleared the way for the importation of DAT. This caused a lull in the battle, but Boyle says that more regulation issues are coming up before Congress. In the mean time, groups on both sides of the issue are re-analyzing the data. The OTA placed its report and the dataset on file at the National Technical Information Service so that anyone who wants to perform a separate analysis can do so.
"I've gotten several calls from research people representing the various parties asking me about the weighting and how we calculated this or that, so I believe there is a lot of secondary and re-analysis is going on right now," Boyle says.