Four quick points before I get going:
- I love The Internets. The Internets are some of the greatest inventions of recent years, and have almost indescribable potential for increasing communication worldwide. This is not an anti-Internets diatribe.
- Piracy ≠ unauthorised distribution. “Piracy” involves mass duplication of copyrighted material for financial or material gain; “unauthorised distribution” encompasses the phenomenon of placing a copy of something in a place where everyone has the facility to make their own copy. They have many factors in common, but they’re not equivalent.
- And, yes- the title of the post is a bit of a trick. Obviously, it’s not the format of a piece of music that’s the issue, but the method of distribution that really causes the problems. And yes, the Music Industry is a pretty bad thing, and it probably should be killed; it will never die, of course. What I’m suggesting is that, once the current glut of unauthorised music downloads does the damage of bankrupting the labels that stick to their previous business model, music lovers and bands alike will have a rough time finding good music, and being financially rewarded for their art, respectively.
- Also, I’m going to use “home taping” to cover tapes, CDs and Minidiscs too. Because I can.
Imagine this. It’s 1998, ten years ago, and you want to hear a new album. You don’t have much money, so you’re hoping to get a copy from somewhere, and you find out through conversation that a friend of yours has just bought it; you ask him if he wouldn’t mind making you a copy. You and your friend would have to have a pretty good relationship, because it would actually take them some time and effort to make this copy for you: blank CD-R are still relatively pricey, and home burning is painfully slow and unreliable, meaning that your friend would have to tinker with their computer and set things up to make sure the copy burnt properly. If you wanted a cassette tape copy (for tapes are still very much a major player), your friend would have to work out the right level to record onto the particular type of tape you were using, and so on, and would have to keep half an eye on it to make sure that a song didn’t break off halfway through, when the side ended.
So now your copy exists, but your friend still has it, of course. It’s round at his house. So you meet up again; you go out for a drink or a coffee, you talk about the record, you buy your friend a drink to say thanks, and you arrange to meet up again soon. Because he’s your friend, and that’s what friends do. You go home, stick it on your hi-fi and have a listen. Maybe it doesn’t grab you. Maybe, because of the effort it’s taken you to get it, and because your friend has a high opinion of it, you give it another play later on, and this time you hear something you didn’t before, and it starts to grow on you. By the end of the year, maybe you think it’s one of the best albums of the year.
And now, here we are in 2008. Imagine the same situation. You want to hear a new album. You don’t have much money, so you’re hoping to get a copy from somewhere. You head over to isohunt.com, and you type in the name of the album. It’s there, 128kbps, originally uploaded by someone you’ve never met and never will, perhaps someone who doesn’t even speak the same language as you. You click on “Download Torrent”, and go back to updating your blog while the file downloads in the background. Ten minutes later, it’s on your computer; you import it into iTunes, and listen to it through your computer’s speakers. Maybe it doesn’t grab you straight away. Maybe, because it didn’t take you much effort to get it, you don’t bother giving it another listen. Maybe you decide to find another album people are talking about on the Drowned In Sound forums and download it, to see if you like that one any more.
Obviously, these scenarios change slightly, but they are typical; I don’t think I’ve over-, or under-, stated either position particularly. Home taping was never going to kill off such a colossal industry, because the method of distribution was too small and, crucially, you had to know someone who had the record in the first place.
A brief digression: hands up if you remember Bulletin Boards [I think we can safely discount anyone under the age of about 20, here; even then, you’d have to be pretty precocious with your computer use]. As a pre-Internet phenomenon, BBS certainly had their limitations (if you’re interested, you can read about them here). I can just about remember using BBSs, in the pre-internet days, on which programs and files were shared. Back then, bandwidth was a precious commodity, and you would generally only be allowed access to the BBS after having first uploaded a certain amount of material that the BBS didn’t already have. “Leeching” (taking without giving) was still an insult, rather than just another word for “downloading”, and those who owned BBSs would often keep each other informed about known leechers, blocking them from their boards if they could. At this stage, even though we’re talking about illegally disseminating software, there’s still a degree of social responsibility, and personal interaction- BBS numbers aren’t generally advertised, and often you’d have to know someone personally who could tell you the dial-up number.
You can see where I’m going with this. I’m not mourning the death of the Music Industry, I’m mourning the decay of social interaction, and the loss of investment in something. Even if it’s not financial investment in buying someone’s record, by getting hold of a copy through someone you know, you have both invested time and effort in getting hold of it. The incredible ease with which it is possible to get hold of almost any recording means that nothing at all has been invested in it’s acquisition- no time, no effort, no money, no social investment, with the following effects-
- A total loss of appreciation for how fucking hard it is to make a record- with almost every recording ever made available at the touch of a button, the understanding of the work that goes into a record is lost, and music is completely devalued.
- The loss of social interaction and discussion about music- if it’s easier to get hold of music than it is to see a friend and talk about it, then the process of recommending material to people you know is short-circuited, and social interaction is also devalued.
- If a recording isn’t immediately accessible, maybe you won’t give it another listen. This, of course, means that only the most instantly appealing recordings will have any sort of success and, as everyone eventually realises, the best art requires some effort on the part of its audience. The quality of music, as an art form, is also devalued.
Major labels, of course, haven’t helped their cause by constantly crying wolf. When radio broadcasts became common, there was outcry, as it was supposedly going to kill off the sales of records. When people began making compilation tapes for their friends, there was another outcry for the same reasons. When CDs became cheap enough for ordinary people, another outcry erupted; same with Minidiscs. They were wrong, and they knew they were wrong- claiming that “you’re hurting the artists with your copying” was a cheap tactic to try to stop people diminishing their profits. Now that something might actually destroy their entire industry, no-one believes them.
In the short-term, the effect of peer-to-peer filesharing is that we consumers are having our revenge on an industry that has ripped off consumers and artists alike, for many years. We are now able to obtain their products free of charge, and with almost no risk to ourselves. In the slightly-more-distant future, though, I think things will change for the worse. Here’s what I think will happen:
- The big players in the music industry have left it too late to change their business models. The drop in sales of CDs, and the near-constant availability of their products for free, will mean that their business stops, for all intents and purposes.
- This, coupled with the enormous rise of sites like MySpace, and the proliferation of cheap recording software, will result in an enormous glut of badly written, shoddily performed, and poorly produced music recordings. We’re already most of the way there, but it’s going to become even worse.
- Professional-quality audio recordings will become scarce, as more and more studios are forced to close down. Who’s going to pay someone money to record their music when Apple are giving away GarageBand with every computer, and no-one understands how hard it is to make a quality recording?
- With this hypersaturation of music, it will become much harder for an audience to find music that’s good, and for a good musical group to have their music heard above the throng of poorly-made music.
- The only people able to make a living from their music will be those who make functional music- soundtrack for films, adverts, TV shows. Music becomes part of another endeavour, and its role as an artform becomes much weaker.
The thing about technology is that you can’t go back. You can’t uninvent something. We are now stuck with the consequences. Of course, the pendulum will swing back the other way, and a new order of bastards will take over the industry, and they’ll establish their business paradigm, and fleece every one of us all over again. But, in the next few years, I think we’re all going to do pretty poorly out of exacting our revenge.
I have a word for the coming wave of badly-made stuff.
Ar-meh-geddon
