Let me start by saying this: I own thousands of albums. I literally have
somewhere in the ballpark of 1300 CDs at home and also a fair number
sitting in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. They have called asking me
to clear out those CDs, as well as another 1000 albums on cassette and
vinyl, and even a couple of 8-tracks I once picked up at a pawn shop in a
misguided attempt to be cool. (Ah wayward youth!)
With almost as much clarity as I remember waking up hungover on September
11th 2001 to a frantic answering-machine message from a friend yelling
something about planes and terrorists, I recall the first time I loaded up
Napster (then a free and unenforced haven for file-traders). The program
that opened in front of me prompted me to search for an artist (a task I
had attempted many a time before on FTP-portal sites and IRC channels). I
typed Radiohead, and hit the enter key. The screen filled up with
hundreds…maybe thousands…of clickable links….albums, bootlegs,
singles, b-sides. The stuff I could buy at normal price and the rare items
with $50 Ebay reserves, sitting side by side on my screen…all FREE! I
highlighted a concert from the OK Computer tour and told this mysterious
program to fetch it for me at my newly acquired DSL speed. I couldn’t get
over how easy it was. By that night I had more music than I could listen
to in 2 entire days.
Not long after that, a band that I had parted ways with years before
started a big media hubbub, trying frantically to sue this heavenly piece
of software out of existence. Their reasoning was sound…as music-writers
and signed artists they were righteously upset at the sight of their tunes
being fetched by tens of 1000s of listeners for free. They should be
getting a few cents each for those trades, right? What would their label
think, with its copyright so flagrantly infringed upon?
(Certainly none of the downloaders, except maybe a few insane ones, would
claim authorship of the Metallica material. That part of the copyright was
intact. However, the copyright owner has the legal privilege of charging
listeners some cash to hear/own this material, and if a website or other
internet entity wishes to allow access to this music, they must pay a
licensing fee.)
What has changed in these few years, from the days when I nearly shat
myself with glee downloading concert after concert at 128kbps, to
now…years mired in the wartime blues? Did I forsake my duty as music
consumer and stop purchasing compact discs? I did not…in fact my
collection has grown at roughly the same rate it did before. Did I stop
downloading MP3s? I did not…in fact I have more music sitting there
waiting to be listened to than I ever have before. (To the little kid in
me who remembers burning-out on one cassette album for months before
begging my dad for some money to get the next piece of music…hungry for
more tunes…never being able to get enough…this whole thing seems a bit
absurd. What can I say? I love music, and now I have access to more than I
ever imagined possible prior to 2000.)
So what’s changed outside my little world? Illegal file-sharing utilities
are still available, but the mainstream embraces the $1 song, which they
can put on their IPod before dancing around their neighborhood looking dumb
(like on the commercial!). Napster was legally challenged, was shut down,
and then like a cash-strewn phoenix rose from the ashes bearing
content-licenses and music industry support. Now it boasts the most
Buddhic subscription service one might imagine: you own nothing…except
the subscription. The music is available in unlimited quantity. You can
hear as much as you could hear before, and this time all they ask is a
monthly fee to cover their licensing expense. (In fairness to
bootleg-starved, b-side collecting nerds like myself, the content available
is generally restricted to that which the industry feels like releasing.
We must look elsewhere for our rare goodies, but the masses are sated.)
And now…finally…at the end of the road…Metallica…who once released
a free demo cassette with instructions to copy it for your friends if you
like it…have finally embraced online music, and have made their entire catalog available for download. Things haven’t really
changed for this band since their anti-Napster spat. Account-holders can
still type “Metallica” at a little prompt and receive unlimited access to
their works. The band will *not* receive a few cents for each of those
people listening. However, their music will reach more people, their label
will receive licensing money, and technological progress emerges
victorious.
Even I, who can happily listen to an artist’s album of 45 minutes or more
uninterrupted, will go the way of the music-nerd dinosaur. Singles have
become the unit of sale, as they were in the 50s and early 60s. An artist
won’t try and make the best album they can, but will rather try to record as many sellable songs as they can. Audiences may never again snap up lengthy
concept pieces like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Sgt. Pepper, and the LP-format
may be surrendered to the vaults of antiquity. Every day, music changes and evolves. One thing remains the same: I still can’t live without it.