DAT RECORDER DEBATE ERUPTS

Digital audio tape (DAT) recorders were all the rage at the summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago recently, but it may be some time before these latest audio wonders are widely marketed anywhere in the United States.

Even at prices ranging from $1,300 to $1,600 apiece, DAT recorders are already back-ordered in Japan, where they first went on sale March 2. But piracy and the politics of protectionism have combined to create a major roadblock--and a major debate--over the import of DAT recorders to this country.

At issue is whether Congress should require the predominantly Japanese DAT recorder manufacturers, such as Sony and Hitachi, to insert anti-copying devices in their products before they can be sold in the United States.

About the only thing that DAT proponents and opponents agree on is that digitally reproduced music is the best, most authentic sound to ever emerge from a speaker system. First developed by Japanese engineers in the early ‘80s, DAT is the tape version of the compact disc. A computerized pattern imprinted on tape in a cassette about two-thirds the size of a typical cassette is “read” by laser. According to experts and amateurs alike, the resulting sound reproduction is as good as the studio master tapes that record companies use to press original albums.

As a result, DAT has become a political football in Washington, with proposed DAT prohibition legislation bouncing between Senate and House subcommittees since the beginning of the year.

At the outset of last month’s electronics exposition, it was predicted that one of the 60 Japanese companies that have been refining DAT technology for the last five years would announce U.S. importation of DAT recorders regardless of recording industry opposition.

Sure enough, spokesmen for Marantz Co. Inc. announced that its DT 84 deck would be in U.S. stores by October, setting the stage for an inevitable showdown.

PRO: Recording Industry

Predicts Music

Piracy Without

Anti-Copying

Device.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA), which represents the interests of pop musicians and their recording companies, refuses to accept DAT as inevitable.

The RIAA contends that consumers who own a DAT deck won’t need to buy anything but prerecorded and blank DAT cassettes ever again. They can then copy prerecorded DAT tapes on blank DAT cassettes and sell or give them away to others, thus reducing overall sales of a record album. The $4.6-billion-a-year recording industry already estimates it loses up to $1.5 billion annually to such duplication on standard tape decks.

With little variation since the Senate and House began holding hearings last winter, recording industry witnesses have testified that DAT threatens the music industry itself because the high-quality DAT machines will make it possible to make near-perfect clones of record albums, prerecorded tape cassettes or compact discs.

With the high-quality DAT system, the now-emerging compact disc business could be killed in its cradle, the RIAA argues.

CON: Manufacturers Say

DAT Is Inevitable, That

Anti-Copying Device Will

Distort Sound.

The Electronics Industry Assn., which lobbies Congress on behalf of tape deck manufacturers and retailers, makes the simple argument that technology is inevitable.

“Does the record industry really expect you to buy a Springsteen record in every single format--vinyl album, prerecorded tape, compact disc and DAT?” asks EIA spokesman Allan Schlosser. “It’s perfectly legal to make a copy of a CD at home right now on your present tape recorder for your personal use. We don’t endorse pirating, but we don’t equate personal non-commercial use with pirating either. If you go out and make 50 copies to sell them on the street, that’s pirating. If you make one, it isn’t.”

DAT proponents say that anti-copying measures put forth to date by the recording industry would distort or otherwise damage the quality of the digital audio tape system.

While Congress wrestles with the issue, Schlosser foresees even more Japanese manufacturers following the Marantz lead and effectively circumventing the anti-copying chip issue altogether. The future cannot be forestalled through legislation forever and digital audio tape is the future, he reasoned.

Schlosser points to the RIAA’s own sales figures to prove his prediction that the very threat to the status quo that the RIAA is protesting will eventually become its chief source of profit. Prerecorded tape cassettes surpassed the traditional vinyl LP albums in total annual sales beginning in 1983. Cassettes accounted for $1.8 billion in sales that year while LP sales stood at $1.69 billion.

That trend has continued and, last year, the RIAA reported that LP sales only accounted for $983 million in sales while prerecorded cassettes earned the record companies $2.5 billion--more than half its entire reported sales.

Schlosser predicted the same pattern as prerecorded DAT decks come to replace traditional tape decks in homes, offices and automobiles. “They don’t have horns or breathe fire,” he said.

THE RESOURCES:

Capitol Hill Withstands

Assault of Ads, Rhetoric,

Celebrities, Letters.

Using the umbrella name Coalition to Save America’s Music, the RIAA has assembled a formidable list of organizations to lobby for legislation requiring the so-called “spoiler” device on every DAT deck shipped to this country. Chaired by opera star Beverly Sills, the coalition is composed of 34 music industry groups ranging from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers to the Songwriters Guild of America to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

But the RIAA remains the driving force behind the coalition, coordinating a publicity campaign from its Washington, D.C., headquarters that has taken up half the time of the association’s public relations staff, according to spokeswoman Patricia Heimers. To the record companies that the RIAA represents, like Warner Bros. and CBS, the DAT deck is the biggest threat to the profitability of American music since the invention of the radio.

“In the music world, there’s only one real way to make it: Record your music and sell a lot of records,” singer Emmylou Harris testified last month before the House subcommittee on commerce, consumer protection and competitiveness. “And I mean a lot of records.

“That’s why it hurts so bad, if you’re an artist or if you have that dream of getting somewhere as an entertainer, to realize that a lot of sales of your recordings are never going to happen because people can get a perfect copy from a DAT recorder for free.”

The Coalition to Save America’s Music have been sending music publishers, record company executives, songwriters and even high-profile performers like Harris and Mary Travers of the Peter, Paul and Mary folk singing trio to testify on Capitol Hill.

“Technology has changed how artists create but not our need to protect our work,” Travers told the Senate subcommittee on communications last month.

“To allow technology to leave the artists’ labor and property unprotected is to deny the most basic of all laws: that men and women are entitled to the fruit of their labors.”

THE OUTLOOK:

DAT ‘Spoiler Chip’

on Congressional

Hold; First DAT

Shipment Due in Fall.

While the two sides argue the issue both in and out of the Capitol building, Congress has punted the anti-copying device itself to the National Bureau of Standards.

According to bureau spokesman Michael Baum, the chairmen of both the House subcommittee on courts and civil liberties (Rep. Robert Kastenmeier, D-Wis.) and the Senate subcommittee on patents, copyrights and trademarks (Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz.) asked the bureau early this month to test an anti-copying data chip.

They want to see whether such a chip would affect the quality of DAT music and, more importantly, they want to know whether it will be effective at all in preventing DAT deck owners from copying music, Baum said.

“What we told them was that we didn’t have the proper expertise and didn’t want to get involved,” Baum said.

The bureau will have to hire outside audio experts “at a considerable price tag,” and even then it will take several months to get results, Baum said.

Both Senate and House subcommittees have declared an impasse on any further action on the proposed anti-copying bill until they get the bureau results.

In the meantime, the Electronics Industry Assn. has adopted its own lobbying name in the DAT controversy: the Home Recording Rights Coalition. In addition to Japanese DAT manufacturers, the coalition membership includes American and European electronic hardware manufacturers.

Besides sending its own persuasion team to Congress, the Home Recording Rights Coalition recently mounted an ad war, taking out the first of what could be several large ads in music trade publications touting DAT technology while condemning the RIAA’s spoiler chip. The Coalition to Save America’s Music answered with its own ad two weeks later, praising the chip as the only current logical solution to the problem of piracy.

Japanese DAT manufacturers remain wary of unnecessarily aggravating a protectionist-minded Congress, but note that there are currently no laws forbidding sale of recorders without anti-copying devices in the United States.

“We still don’t have a date on when DAT will be sold here,” said David Kawakami, Sony Corp.’s U.S. spokesman. “The machine just went on the market in March in Japan and, traditionally, products don’t follow to the States for six months to a year.”

Regardless of whether it happens next month or next year, DAT is inevitable and attempting to legislate against it is folly, according to Schlosser.

“I can’t help but draw the analogy to the motion picture industry,” he said. “The Motion Picture Producers Assn. was so upset when we first introduced the videocassette recorder, and now home video is an extremely important cash cow for Hollywood.

“I predict the same thing is going to happen with DAT.”